I’ve always been the type of person who enjoys looking back on previous times in my life and seeing my own personal growth, and I’ve always enjoyed taking this time for myself and for introspection. However, in this day and age, everyone seems to be so busy, jam packing their schedules and settling into routines that leave them with little time for themselves or for reflection. Ever since I was around eight years old, I’ve kept a journal, the contents of which have ranged from to-do lists to detailed accounts of my day to little doodles or quotes that I like to read. However, these journals that I keep are often filled with large gaps of time, from several weeks to several months. As I get older, I just find myself straying away from journaling when I have any free time at all and turning instead to Netflix or taking a nap.
But over winter break, when I was at home with barely anything to do, I rediscovered some of these old journals and spent a whole afternoon reading through them, unearthing all of the thoughts, desires and feelings I had as a middle schooler and high schooler. Being able to look back on these aspects of my life sparked some motivation in me, and my New Year’s Resolution became: find more time for journaling.
For the entire month of January, I’ve stuck to that resolution, setting aside time each evening to unwind from the day and unpack my thoughts and emotions. Doing so has taught me a lot about journaling and a lot about myself.
Journaling is an amazing way to look at your personal growth. Even after just one month, I found myself excited to look back and see what was going through my mind at the beginning of the month in comparison to the end of the month. I was able to see growth throughout a short amount of time, which motivates me to continue to journal. Imagine how much I’ll be able to look back on at the end of six months or a year.
Journaling provided me with an outlet for unwanted emotions. If I was ever annoyed with someone or felt the urge to lash out at them, I found it helpful to sit down and organize my thoughts into lists or paragraphs. This usually helped me to calm down and to avoid acting rashly, allowing me the opportunity to think through my feelings rather than just act without thinking at all.
Forcing myself to journal every day set me up for failure. For years now, my goals have been to journal every single day, a moderately unfeasible task for a busy person. Every single time I would miss a day I would get mad at myself for it, causing me to stop journaling altogether, feeling as though I had failed my goal. So this year, I decided to revise my goal to journaling often rather than every day. And I have found that this has made me even more motivated to take the time to journal, since it has lower stakes and I’m not constantly worried about journaling.
Not every entry has to be deep and introspective. This is something that I’ve really struggled with in the past. Instead of enjoying my reflection time as I journaled, I spent too long stressing over writing down the perfect deep and ruminative sentence or phrase. But once I started doing it every day, I started thinking about what I was writing less and just wrote more. So my entries began to stray away from deep thoughts and poetic prose and turned into a list of what I ate for breakfast that day or a fun story of something that happened that day in class. And I discovered that I enjoyed writing those bits and reading them back just as much as I enjoyed the introspective parts.
Overall, I found that journaling every day for a month taught me that it was a worthwhile and substantial way to pass the time and create an end-product I was proud of and could look back on with gratification and fulfillment. If you’re looking for a way to fill some time that includes aspects of introspection, or just a way to look back on yourself in the future, consider taking up journaling!