My older sister gave me a lovely leather-bound journal one month into sixth grade, when all students in my grade went on a week-long trip to a nature center called Eagle Bluff. She encouraged me to use it to keep track of the experience, and I wrote in that journal for most of the next year or two. Looking back, many entries were a bit dramatic, but I think they were accurate to how I felt at the time. It was my first time using a journal, and in particular my first time doing serious introspection. I enjoyed the process, but eventually lost the habit and didn’t try to pick it back up regularly until college.
In college I experimented with a home-grown journaling solution using plain text files. I wanted an “informational” journal, something that would be used not just for personal examination, but also thoughts on math or whatever the heck else. I wanted it to be a rougher repository for my thoughts than this blog, and wrote various Python scripts to do searches across files for my tagging system. Basically, I was trying to create an Obsidian-like program on my own.
That didn’t stick either.
Moving to San Diego after college prompted another run at journaling, but I knew I needed something easy and accessible. I used an app called Journey [[[LINK]]] on my phone. I could quickly rate my day, write a few sentences about what happened or how I was feeling, and add pictures or other media if I wanted. This was my most successful attempt at documenting my life. I kept up with it for over a year and a half, stopping right after the pandemic hit and I drove home to be with family.1I have no memory of why I stopped, but I re-downloaded the app to confirm the timeline. It’s fascinating to look back over this, and worth exploring more in another post.
Now, with my yearly theme in mind and a large number of journals in my possession, I wanted to get back on the journal train. I grabbed an empty moleskin and just started writing. It’s been almost two weeks, and I’ve written every day. No entry has felt like a slog or an obligation. I look forward to it each day and find myself writing more each time I come back to the journal.
I think this prose-style journal aligns with me incredibly well. The reptition of a “bullet journal” style approach, including the excellent Theme System, is that the repetition (though good for data collection) makes me complacent. I try to take it seriously, but it doesn’t typically stick. Looking back over the Journey app, entries quickly devolved to be a sentence or two highlighting major events and maybe the general feeling for the day. This isn’t inherently bad, but it’s not the focused approach I want to encourage.
A benefit of writing long-form entries is that it slows down my thought process enough that, as I’m writing, I get this sense that I’m having a measured conversation with myself. Writing by hand is a slow process compared to typing (or speaking, or thinking). My brain must stay focused enough to complete the sentence I’ve begun, and so the shape of the thought has more time to evolve than it would if I were typing—in which case, if the thought is incomplete or poorly-worded, simply gets deleted and rephrased.
In short, journaling is scratching an itch I didn’t know I have. It is a sounding board for my thoughts, a place to put the day to rest, and allows a time and a space to process any thoughts I have. I think any form of journaling is beneficial, though for me it’s not about being efficient with my journaling time, it’s about savoring it.
- 1I have no memory of why I stopped, but I re-downloaded the app to confirm the timeline. It’s fascinating to look back over this, and worth exploring more in another post.