I started journaling when I was 13. The principal of my secondary school made sure every student had a handbook. In it, everyone wrote down the daily homework assignments. In the rest of the blank space, I started adding in notes about my day.
The habit carried on when I graduated to junior college, through university, work, and (clearly) the here and now.
What’s inside my journals (yes, in the plural, I’m running three right now)? Thoughts and to-do’s, little doodles sometimes, what I ate and when, what I weigh, the weather… Feelings, things I’ve done, dreams and ideas…
I use my entries as ways to release all the thoughts in my head. When I put my to-do’s on paper I know I’m not forgetting something, and it helps keep me on track. My mind empties and I can work on something. When I write down what I’m frustrated with, or the things that have made me happy, my heart feels lighter.
And when I wrote about my traumatic past, I realised that my journal entries help me with something else:
My journals hold the space for me to come back to myself later.
When I write about my life I’m forced to turn it into a narrative. When I take fleeting, messy images and feelings and put them down in words, I am forced to pick a perspective. Like a camera angle or a narrator’s voice, writing makes meaning out of my memories. I find a plot in the chaos.
But I don’t notice it until I read my own words later.
When I read my own story I watch it unfold the way I understood it. I see how I’m thinking, how my emotions and judgements have coloured the events. It isn’t so much the event that happened, it’s the perspective I’ve taken without knowing.
And that’s the part I can edit.
Stories are powerful things. We learn about the world through them. Understand others with them. And the stories we tell ourselves — about ourselves — affect us for the rest of our lives.
I can’t edit the events. They happened. The stories have to be true.
But I can choose what the camera sees, what the narrator says, and how the story ends.
Yes, I was abused — I can keep the camera there forever, and have the narrator repeat that story ad infinitum, or I can focus on the growth and moving on — it wasn’t my fault. The shame isn’t mine to carry. And I have traumas that I will recognise so that I can heal and love myself.
Yes, I made unusual relationship decisions — I can knock myself down, hide in shame, wallow in what happened, or I can plant it all firmly as a backstory, and start writing new chapters — I can learn what real, healthy, secure relationships are like, and do the work so that I can be amazing both on my own and with everyone else I am with.
When I come back to reading my past, I get to see my mistakes and my wins. And I can choose to love myself. The journals will hold it all for me until then.
Journaling.
Something that I’ve done for more than half my life, that I’ve taken for granted, and I’m falling in love with it, am grateful for it, all over again.
💕🌧️
Image of a journal and a cup on a table by the window by David Schwarzenberg from Pixabay.
