Journaling Tips

This is the last type of post I ever thought I would actually get around to writing. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm not qualified to write this, but it's pretty close. I've had no trouble being consistent with the fictional stories I've written over the years, but when it comes to journaling, I'm like a bear who hibernates in the winter but not during any of the other seasons. My record for journaling is like two months. Sometimes I forget about it, but usually my perfectionism takes over and convinces me it looks bad and that my life is too boring. I'm so used to plots and writing page-turners that when I see my own thoughts aren't page-turners, it makes me want to give up. I want to have as exciting of a life as Harry Potter and have action every day. But that's simply not the case. Journaling doesn't even have action at all usually. It's more about feelings and emotions.

I get that now. I've been seeing a therapist for a few weeks now, and she gave me the challenge of typing my journal rather than writing it by hand to get rid of the perfectionism factor.

It's worked, but the way I write my journal isn't the main thing making it work.

It's a lot of things.

I decided to format it differently. My therapist mentioned how I need to start looking inwardly. Lately I've been trying to find who I am externally by seeing what groups I fit into. What I need to do is see what my beliefs are personally and then reflect those with my friends. It should be me first, groups second. My therapist told me that when I feel an emotion, I need to really look into why I feel that emotion. It reminds me of the strategy I learned about avoiding negative self-talk. If you understand why you feel a certain way, you can learn so much more about yourself.

I took this idea to my journaling and I decided to only journal to my emotions. My first entry for example reads, "Dear Confusion," and then I wrote about how I'm confused with who I am right now in life. I'm not going to get into it because this is a blog and not a journal, but you get the point. By writing to my emotions, I'm able to understand why I'm writing to them. It's so good to get it all out. Plus, by doing that, I don't have to write every day and it takes away the boredom in my old entries. Even in novels, so much time passes. The writer doesn't write every single day in their character's life because that would be insanely long and boring.

I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere. I even color code the emotions. Sadness will be blue and anger will be red, for example. I'm using a cool-looking font too that I can't remember the name of, and that also motivates me to keep writing.

In general, I'm proud of myself for not treating writing like a job anymore. I've stopped writing so much at once. I do so much writing about characters and I work myself to death, when all I needed was to care about myself as much as I care about my characters and allow myself an outlet too. I need to view myself as my own character with my own story.

Obviously I still need a lot of work because change doesn't happen overnight but this is definitely a good form of self-care that I would recommend to everyone.

Dear Jealousy,

I'm jealous of other people who have better looking journals than me.

Haha Jk.