🧵 Thursday Thread: The "Journaling Question"
Do you or don't you journal? How, when, where? Do you ever destroy journals? Do you worry about harm from journaling--to others or yourself? Has journaling ever changed your life? Let's discuss.
First, an apology! Yesterday’s post had a broken link to the story we’re talking about when it went out, so if you open the link in the email it won’t work. It has since been updated in the post, so if you tried in the email, it should work for you here now.
Second, an invitation to check out last week’s Friendship Experiment Thursday Thread where community members are finding each other for local and online connections for everything from writing together to hiking to book groups to social activism to full moon rituals and more. If you haven’t checked it out, you might want to. We’re going to do these Friendship threads regularly because the more we connect right now, the better.
Third, we still have a few lodge/cabin spots open for Writing in the Dark | The CAMP and now that we’re really filling in all the nitty gritty details of our four-day adventure, I’m getting incredibly excited to be at Wandawega with you in August!
The combination of nature, community, yoga & meditation, writing, music, art (including art for non-artists!), and craft talks, including from featured writer
, is going to be simply extraordinary. This is the creative immersion I need right now. Camp musician has already ordered supplies for friendship bracelets, and we’re even considering mesh bags for mess kits because Camp Wandawega has camp dishes. We’re leaning into the campy part of CAMP and it’s getting more exciting every day. We hope you’ll grab one of the last beds and toast a marshmallow with us while breaking open your fierce original voice.And now for today’s thread: The Journaling Question.
This topic is inspired by a project I was asked to do recently, which was to answer a questionnaire for a project called Show Me Your Diary on
‘s Substack, . That interview will run in a few weeks, so I don’t want to write too much about it here yet, except to say it was fascinating for me to answer those questions—and to thumb through all my journals in order to answer them.It made me think about all of you, and your journaling habits. Maybe you, like receive a lot of journals as gifts, since you’re a writer. I know I have about ten million in my house—the ones pictured here on my dining table are mot even all of them. And I do journal, but over the years I have developed very specific ways of journaling.
For one thing, I use very specific journals (again, I unpack all of that in the Show Me Your Diary interview, so I’ll share that when it comes out). For another thing, I noticed that I circle back to certain topics repeatedly in my journals, even over a span of decades.
One of those topics is gratitude. So many gratitude lists! That can’t be a bad thing, I’m pretty sure. Also, goals. Also, lots of shimmers and shards of poetry. I didn’t even realize how much “poemish” stuff I’m constantly capturing in my journals.
What I don’t do much in my journals is to record the activities of my daily life. A little, sometimes. And because of my current journaling method, which combines my journal with a running to-do list, those activities do tend to get documented. I only occasionally or, actually, rarely write about problems, it seems—especially conflicts. I think this is because I have written things I regretted in journals, so I’m wary of that now.
I don’t want to put anything in writing—concretize it—when I know it will most likely be better in the morning. Then around 2012, when I started following the work of James Pennebaker—especially his research on writing to heal, or expressive writing, including a four-day exercise I have used again and again on retreats. Through Pennebaker’s work, I learned that a structured approach to writing about a problem—an approach that creates a kind of narrative—can be very healing, whereas just writing about the problem repeatedly can have the opposite effect. Not that we shouldn’t write about problems! Sometimes I do. But I exercise caution.
The real purpose of my journal seems to be to offer a place to “count my blessings,” a place to dream out loud, and a place to collect fragments of language, and a place to doodle, draw, chant (for some reason I’m always writing down these sort of chants of repeated phrases), and to be really messy. Only rarely does my journal really sound like … a journal, which is to say, a kind of narrative of life. Here’s a couple of pages from 2014 that do sort of resemble that, and which I sent to my kids last night:
Oh, yeah, and the “trying to be a better person” is also a constant refrain in my journals. Turns out, that’s a journey, not a destination.
Meanwhile, what about you? Do you journal? Why or why not? And if you do …
When did you first begin journaling, and what was your original reason for doing so? Has that reason changed?
How has your journaling practice evolved over the years—in form, frequency, content, or intention?
Do you have distinct phases of your life that are documented in different kinds of notebooks or systems (e.g., travel journals, grief journals, dream logs)? What do those forms say about who you were then?
What do the gaps in your journaling—times you stopped writing—reveal about your inner world at the time?
Have you ever destroyed a journal—or wanted to? Why?
What patterns do you notice when you reread your journals? Are there obsessions, loops, repetitions that reveal something you hadn’t seen at the time of writing?
Has journaling ever changed your mind about something important—an opinion, a memory, a relationship, yourself?
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