Imagine you had the worst week of your life. Your boss cut down your hours, you bombed that midterm you studied for weeks on, all while your first love cheated on you. Now imagine you had the best week of your life. You got a promotion, hit your body goals, and got accepted into your dream university. Life is bound to throw curveballs, and while some people try to suppress or distract themselves, there is no escape from facing our feelings head-on. We decide whether those feelings are addressed in a productive manner, or choose to ignore our internal chaos and surrender our composure.
I began journaling to document the happy moments of my life, but one can imagine what that meant to a middle-schooler: landing a dumb joke everyone laughed at, or getting compliments on a new water bottle. It would be so trivial writing these details as a 21-year-old, but I found it endearing how young Gayathri could find the littlest praises to be so heart-swelling.
Not all my journal entries were so innocent, though. Sometimes dark emotions, such as humiliation or hopelessness, found their debut on the crisp pink pages of my Hello Kitty journal. In those heated moments, writing about my thoughts stabilized me, as though I was plucking each emotion from my mind and locking them in-between the notebook lines. Journaling couldn’t relieve me of the pain entirely, but it brought me a sense of autonomy and control in a fragile life stage where that was minimal.
Journaling has been an incredibly profound tool for me to effectively process my emotions—hence why I continued the practice for over 10 years. However, it took me five full journals before I felt the powerful connection between my past, present, and future selves. Rather than titling my entries, “Dear Diary,” I had always written, “Dear Future,” and “Sincerely, The Past,” as though both were some omnipotent beings trapped in a one-sided communication portal. Only when I had completed my first year of college, when I looked back at my high school diaries cringing, laughing, crying, and smiling over the highs and lows, did I understand I was writing to different versions of myself all along. Both my past and future selves were trying to lock hands in a distant time warp, where my past self searched for hope, and my current self searched for approval. “Would young Gayathri be proud of me now?” I never grew up having a role model, and rarely did I have idols I wished to become like. Only after reading my past diaries, did I realize I want to be someone my younger self would be proud of.Â
Like any historical textbook, our journals hold far more knowledge than what it’s usually purposed for. It can confront us to the realities of who we were and how that made us who we are today. It can introduce us to our strengths and flaws, what we kept vs abandoned, and who we love versus used to love. As potent as it all sounds, there is a great beauty to seeing how we develop over the years. I would encourage anyone to look at blank sheets of paper as opportunities to preserve your authentic mind and reality. Being able to spill your happiest and darkest moments onto one canvas and observe the painting back to see who you truly were can be sobering and enlightening. Moreso, you can gain more respect for yourself as you analyze those complicated emotions and let the peaceful balance of it all be channeled outward.