When I was younger, I kept a diary. It was pink with white and yellow daisies but I didn’t use it much. At the time, I had this idea that people who kept diaries had to write in them every day. I had this pressure to write every day, to make every day worthy enough to write about. I had this same mentality up until a few years ago when I was introduced to journaling. I hadn’t written my thoughts down on paper since I was little — the only things I took to paper were my creative writing stories — but with the introduction of technology into my storytelling, I found myself typing my fictional stories and forgetting all about my journals.
However, around a year ago, I went through a breakup that left me annoyed but not quite angry. I had a hard time processing my emotions because I couldn’t fully comprehend them. That same month, on my birthday, one of my closest friends gave me a set of three Van Gogh journals. At first, I thought I wouldn’t use them, but in retrospect, those three journals have to be one of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten.
Since then, I’ve carried around a journal in my bag. I would journal in my free time about any emotion I was having a hard time comprehending. As my emotions healed, I began to write about things I found interesting and ideas I wanted to explore deeper. Recently, I have toyed with the idea of death and how humans tend to hold on to other living beings, regardless of how different that life may be from human life. I have discussed with my journal the guilt I have felt regarding some of the choices I have made and the ways I have hurt those closest to me. Most recently, I have written about yearning and grieving the loss of the living. I write letters in my journals that sit untouched and unread by those to whom I address them.
I have fallen in love with how journaling has allowed me to get to know myself more and how I no longer feel the need to write about daily life. Now, I am happy with writing about my feelings and thoughts and not taking myself too seriously. I let myself write whenever inspiration strikes me. That may be one or two sentences one day and seven pages a couple of days later. Either way, it has become something I look forward to doing. Being vulnerable with myself is something that has become sacred because I don’t have to pretend to be someone that I’m not when journaling — it’s freeing. Whenever I have something I need to get off my chest but am not comfortable enough to share, I know that I have myself and my journal as listeners.
Journaling does what typing on a computer can’t. Something about writing my thoughts down and making them tangible makes them deeply personal to me. I can go back and read them in a way I wouldn’t have been able to if I had typed them out. I can flip through the pages and recall where I was as I wrote them, and how a tear-stained page becomes a page I can laugh to myself about long after its events no longer affect me. I guess that’s why I have found friendship in the pages of my journal: they’re an extension of myself I can hold and try to comprehend. They have gotten me through break-ups, through missing home, through new friendships and the mourning of the old ones and through self-exploratory paths. Journaling has allowed me to know myself in ways I wouldn’t have been able to had I not taken the time to deconstruct myself into its pages.
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