On Journaling the Uncomfortable (And Remembering the Rest)

I don’t quite remember when I stopped keeping a diary and started a journal, but ever since childhood, I’ve been an avid documenter of everyday life. Somewhere along the way, though, as my journals shed their glitter stickers and bubble-lettered headers, they also began to lose the color of my daily experiences. 

As I transitioned into my teenage years and began navigating the confusion and pressure of growing up as a girl, my journal became a place to untangle the mess being strung together in my mind. It felt freeing to have something waiting for me after a hard day–a space that would hold everything I wasn’t ready to say out loud. But over time, this habit set a precedent: I stopped turning to my journal during the good times, too. 

Now, picking it up only feels natural when something is going wrong. And I know this isn’t unique to me. For many of us, journaling has become synonymous with emotional unpacking. It’s become a last resort, rather than a daily practice. Writing about the bad feels instinctive, while recording the good feels almost like a chore. But why is that?

Part of it, I think, is our impulse to dissect discomfort and try to understand pain. When something hurts, we ask ourselves endlessly: Why do I feel this way? Why am I sad? Why is this making me anxious? Sadness demands explanation, and journaling offers us a way to pull those negative emotions apart until they resemble something logical, something solvable. Happiness, on the other hand, feels self-contained. We accept it without question, letting it pass through us without a need to examine. We rarely pause to ask, “Why am I so happy right now?” because joy doesn’t feel like a problem that needs fixing. 

Sadness also seems to give language permission to flow in a way that happiness often doesn’t. When we’re hurting, our emotions feel heavier. The moment we poke a hole in our minds and let those feelings spill out, they seem to know exactly where they belong on the page. But joy feels slippery and harder to pin down. Even if we try to capture that contentment, I think there’s a fear that in doing so, we’ll flatten it, and reduce something alive into something ordinary. Joy is fragile in that way, as if naming happiness invites its disappearance. 

Journaling the bad has helped me stay connected to my mental health, and in that sense, I am grateful for the habit. But at its core, journaling also serves as an extension of memory. A record of who we were and hoped to be. A way to revisit the past and trace the ways we’ve changed. When I imagine my 30-year-old self looking back at these pages, I worry that all she’ll find are records of loneliness, fear, and uncertainty–how scared I was to grow up, and how often I questioned whether I was choosing the right path. 

Those moments matter. They shaped me. But I don’t want them to be the only story I remember. I also want to remember belly-laughing with my sister, or sitting on the roof with my college friends. Even the mundane, like the week of unexpected sunshine Seattle gifted to us in the middle of January, I want to hold onto. 

The bad will always be there. It lingers, whether we write it down or not. But that’s exactly why documenting the good matters, too. When we make space for the pockets of light, we give ourselves a chance to feel them more fully–both now and later. 

At the end of the day, our journals are there to hold it all: the good, the messy, and the beautifully mundane.

• college
• Journal
• journaling
• memory
• mental health
• mindfulness