I started exploring journaling in recent years after reading different authors' take on this and listening to productivity / mindfulness influencers.
I am not an everyday or a ‘fixed time of the day’ ‘journaler’.
I find myself gravitating towards journaling when I am having several thoughts or strong uncomfortable feelings about something that happened and am not able to process it or access my deeper feelings or thoughts. The discomfort sometimes is so huge that it does not allow me to focus on the task at hand or bring myself fully to any conversation. I occasionally also journal as a means of self study.
In essence, I use journaling as a thinking tool and not something to document my day / life.
(I know people use journaling to record experiences which may be unique in themselves or different from everyday life. They may do this for the sheer joy of cherishing experiences, not forgetting them and hence letting a slice of life slip away, or with the hope to publish them as memoirs, self-help / how-to books, articles to guide others etc.)
When I start writing, my mind's 'resources' which were holding the surface level thoughts start freeing up to recall more facts, and then nuances or label the feelings as they changed with each transaction.
The surface level thoughts could be a memory of what happened / who said what / a hint of unpleasantness in my system, without knowing what emotion it is and what is the root cause of it.
I find journaling faster and more effective when I am writing using pen and paper, instead of typing it out. The spontaneous urge to journal is not inhibited by the requirements of creating files, naming and organising them etc. There is not much room to edit and keep improving what has already been inked when writing by hand, so the spotlight stays on expressing with a natural flow rather than perfecting the language and vocabulary.
I keep the journal / notebook handy and accessible. Personally, I no longer worry about someone reading it. It is an honest conversation with myself where my focus entirely is on how ‘I’ perceived things so I do not feel fearful of being found out or hurting anyone. Another justification to not hide it in a file on the computer.
I have discovered that revisiting what I had journaled in the past is not necessary. What has been processed at this deep level has done its job and must dissolve away.
I keep writing at the speed that my thoughts are pouring out till all that was clouding my mind by its repetitive churning is out there and for a moment nothing more is there to say. Sometimes as I am writing, the parts that were lost start surfacing and the entire sequence has been reconstructed to my amazement. This especially is true if the journaling is done before one retires for the day, as there is something about sleep which erases some chunks thus making it difficult to reconstruct the events satisfactorily.
Then I read what is in front of me and ask myself either the why or what is bothering me. That gives me a direction to dig deeper.
As all the ‘memory’ is out on paper, the mind is now empty. It can look at things objectively, apply whichever framework one may want to in that moment (philosophy, personal values, psychology / Transactional Analysis etc.) and make sense of what happened, again by writing further.
At this stage, I am able to see myself better and more clearly, and if another person is involved, sometimes where they are operating from too. Over time, patterns start becoming apparent. To prevent getting into the same kind of stuckness again, I can define boundaries for myself / others. Resetting my expectations, applying some life principles/rules and updating my narrative about that relationship dynamic happens sometimes.
Sometimes, when further clarity eludes me, talking it out with someone I trust helps.
Or it may not work that easily. Sometimes just accepting that 'it is what it is' and moving on feels calming!
Awareness, found in that moment of journaling, itself can lead to change in the longer run, if we keep at it. There is nothing more to be done in the immediate future.
A young friend recently asked me about my journaling process as he was keen to explore this medium. The above piece is what came out of that prompt.
Journaling within an article on journaling process:
As I worked on this piece, I saw it evolve from a quick text response over WhatsApp to an email to a blog. My need to make it ‘perfect’ (without missing any aspect from my experience, then moving to factoring all generic experience that is common place) and the compulsion to ‘try hard’ for it to be published as a Linkedin post made me keep expanding the scope of this article by introducing Transactional Analysis (TA) jargon, then explaining the jargon for the uninitiated and eventually trying to align everything to the TA lens, so that the article never seemed close to getting completed. The wish to ‘please others’ wanted to get approval from someone to publish this, and get attention and appreciation as ulterior motives that I wrote this!
So I am now allowing myself to publish it on my blog the way it is. This implies there will be an ‘output’ which will not ‘be perfect’. I can come back and improve on it later to make it into a LinkedIn post. I will shift into my Adult ego state, own my agency and validate / stroke myself, so the need for attention and validation which empowers others will be mitigated.
