Feb.25th, 2013, is the date of the first journal I ever wrote. The idea came to me spontaneously while I was occupied with my 7th grade workload, and I recorded my thoughts into a document on my computer. I never expected to still be writing six years later with over 50 entries, but keeping a journal has been one of the best decisions of my life.
The journals started as a fun thing to do when I was bored but progressed into a way for me to vent about what was going on in my life. As someone who has struggled with mental illness for as long as I can remember, the journals became a great way for me to monitor my progress. All of my journals are dated in chronological order , which makes it easy to go back and see how my life has changed. When I first started my journals, I was 12 years old and ridden with social anxiety to the point where I couldn’t go into public places or talk to people without tremendous effort. When my best friend of over 8 years and I got in a fight that ended our friendship, I recorded everything I was feeling, and it helped me cope with having to go into high school completely alone.
The entries progressively got longer as I got older, and their content more serious with each entry. I fell into one of the worst depressive episodes of my life during my freshman year of high school, and my journal entries from that time are particularly difficult to read but allow me to see how much progress I’ve made throughout the years. I shut everyone out for months on end and only found solace in my dark room. It was one of the loneliest times of my life but keeping a journal provided an outlet and a way for me to vent about what I was feeling. Because of my journals, I know just how long this particular episode lasted and what eventually helped me get through it.
After a year’s worth of journal entries written from the perspective of rock bottom, things began looking up, and I started my tenth grade year with a promise to myself that I would do everything in my power to ensure I never felt like that again. March 6th, 2016, was the journal entry that marked the beginning of the best year of my life. Every written entry for the next year was pages long, stating how happy I was that I hadn’t given up. The springtime of that year is nothing but faded memories to me now, but my journals have every thought recorded in detail. Reading the bittersweet entries from that year still lift me up when I feel myself fall.
The journal entries corresponding with my junior and senior year of high school showed how much progress I had made since middle school. Even in other times of distress when I felt like I had nothing left to live for, my journals always reflected that I have a reason not to give up. Keeping this journal has helped me realize that cherished people and periods in our life come and go, but life takes unexpected turns and things happen for a reason.