While any moment is good to start, personal journaling has always been a classical example of new year resolution. And a very healthy one: it increases your awareness and allows you to squeeze to the most the juice of every moment. Furthermore: in an age where time plays and fools us so badly, I have come to think that journaling is a must for mental sanity.
By “personal” here I mean not intended to be read by other people at all. Event though language always means communication, but writing a personal journal is a discipline very different from blogging, for example, and most of its benefits come from such freedom. Writing to oneself is one of those scarce means we have to gain some distance from ourselves, and it can also be a beautiful demonstration of love to oneself.
The best tool to do your journaling is the one that makes you more comfortable, the one that pushes you most easily into writing. As regards myself, I have been journaling in notebooks for more than 15 years now, and only recently made the shift to a computer. Notebooks are more flexible but the computer has the advantage of allowing text search to recover information, make inquiries… Besides, it is said that handwriting and typewriting stimulate different brain areas, so it is a good idea to mix up techniques.
Being a tool for self development, a journal admits as many applications as selves exist. It is an extremely flexible tool, with certain peculiar and unique features:
- It makes essences “sticky”: unless you have a very specialized kind of diary (focused only on relations, family, books, professional or personal development…), there will always come that very intense day at the end of which you open your notebook or text processor and feel a bit confused by the excess of options: what to write, what to save from the whole avalanche? Well, in my experience, the answer is: it doesn’t matter much. Just start writing. Personal journaling, more than any other genre, has that capability to capture the “essence” of the moment, that hidden “90% of the iceberg” beneath the words. An apparently neutral sentence will later evoke very complex moments, moods, situations, the hour of the day, the light… just keep your hand moving, fill a couple of buckets from the river of though. Not much effort considering the reward you get.
- Past means perspective: sometimes, it is incredible how much can one diverge from one week ago’s self. Set the habit of rereading what “that guy” said, and then your course ahead will become steadier. Your “army of one” will be stronger. It is astonishing how much we are able to forget, and how quickly. Really.
- Bring some light upon those vampires: aggressive moments, things that you were on the verge of not writing because they embarrassed you so much… funny how fast they depreciate and become minutiae, nothing: a couple of boring lines. But: in case you hadn’t written them, they would still be inside of you, making their dark job. A journal, even for oneself, requires honesty and courage. And it pays off.
- Destroying prejudices, resistances on writing: a journal is valuable as a training time that you will later take to the other writing you do. Writing a journal means getting used to enable your “verbal mode” every day. Besides, every time you quit writing, your perception has become clearer. Words and reasoning are both sides of the same coin. Don’t care about formal beauty. Just plug yourself into your terminal and let it flow. Nobody’s watching.
- Holidays from coherence: This one is oh so soothing. One day you can say red and then blue the next one. The journal is just a mirror for your processes, a mirror that remains, and you can benefit from that characteristic to use your writing as an “experimentation table” on yourself. Try to know yourself better, always try new things. Example: “I have been a little rude in these days. I am going to try to write in a moderate, understatement-like style and let’s see what can I learn from it later, when it is cooled down”.
- Problem solving: even if you still keep a subliminal writing-for-others stance, or other vices of the kind, even if you constantly fall into self pity, four letter words or obsessions again and again, the simple enunciation of what is happening ALWAYS makes it go ahead.
- Motivation: in my case, I have found that a journal is a very useful platform to give myself orders. Do not write “I’d like to do…”: finish your entry with “now I’ll do…” and then quit the diary. It works for me. I guess it has to do with the power of written word.
So, in case there was still any doubt, I strongly recommend personal journaling for everyone. New year is perhaps a particularly good moment, in case that you feel that you are in the vital frame to accept the commitment. And even if you don’t, its O.K.: no hurry, just give it a thought or two from time to time. And remember: journaling is good for your soul!
Do you have a personal diary? What other purposes have you found for it? How did you get benefitted? What difficulties have you found?
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