Thoughts on Journaling
I've always loved the idea of keeping a journal, but I've never been able to commit to it. I've always enjoyed writing and putting my thoughts to paper. Although thoughts flowed fluidly, I was never able to form a strategy to allow myself to write freely, I was too bundled up in the ideas that I had formed about what a journal should be and how it should be structured and looked.
A couple of years ago, I read a book that fundamentally changed the process of writing for me. In Piranesi, a novel written by Susanna Clarke, the protagonist routinely journals to keep track of his life. It's a great book and I don't want to spoil the plot. The plot isn't the point though. The point is, he wrote his entries, however they came out, and after they had all been written, he compiled a table of contents to organize them.
This should have been the obvious, logical process to writing to me. But I realized in reading this story, that I had made it impossible for myself to keep a journal. I've been obsessed with having a neatly formatted journal that fits in a neat table of contents and a consistent structure throughout. I wanted my journal to be "well crafted" and "together" I guess. I'd been focused on the wrong parts of keeping a journal. I wanted to build a table of contents before I had contents to fill them with. I would set aside a certain number of pages for a certain time frame and try to separate nonexistent entries into categories. I finally understood that the content has to come before the table of contents.
This revelation allowed me to let go of the rigidity of what I had always envisioned journaling should be. It seems the solution is reducing friction instead of brute forcing to establish a habit.
I also tried to write in complete sentences and formatted neatly in a way that would be accessible for others to read. I was stuck in a public writing mindset, as I assume most of us who don't keep journals do. I've had to work to remind myself that the writing is only for me, and it doesn't need to be coherent to others and sometimes even to myself in the future. It's about the raw expression however it comes out, whether that be full paragraphs, lists, fragmented thoughts, pictures and stickers glued in, drawings. Whatever needs to come out.
The hardest part is letting go of what you think something should look like and instead letting it flow out and organizing it later if you choose to. It's about having a conversation with yourself and no one else.
I don't write every day. I just write when it strikes me, but the more often I do it and let it be what it is, the more often I come back to it. Our minds weren't meant to be a consistent storage for our every thought and idea. It's wonderful that we are able to offload information to mediums that can be cataloged and recalled to revisit them in the future. I feel like I've taken writing for granted as a tool for reflection and storage of thoughts and everything else.