I don’t think I have kept a diary since my early teens. Even then it wasn’t used habitually. If anything I’ve avoided consistent use of them.

Don’t get me wrong I love stationary and notebooks, the cuter the better, but the only notebook I have ever written in daily for months at a time was early days in the trenches when my kiddo was first born. It was the best and easiest way to keep track.

There is no writing ritual for journaling regularly for me. I either forget, or do it once in a moon or two. I guess that’s ok. I don’t feel great about it sometimes because of all the pressure to be a writer I must be writing, I must be creating at all hours of the day, that just isn’t the case for me. Living is important to.

So while many find real use in the journaling process, real healing, it is something I struggle with.

Make it make sense.

I love writing, I will happily write stories that work through some of the things that journaling might help with, that counselling would definitely help with. But to work on it so directly? That seems a little self indulgent for me. I know where it stems from. I know that growing up there never really felt like a safe space anywhere but inside a book or on the rare occasion inside my head.

I mean it is entirely possible that something claws at my brain, something I was told as a child. “Never put things on paper.”

Not for any good reason I assure you. I was basically told to keep anything inside good or bad so that there is no evidence, nothing in black and white that I ever thought that way it couldn’t be used against me. Who could have told me that? Mother dearest. Not a pearl of wisdom and nothing to be proud of.

Lets face it, it took years and years before I found my voice.

I’m still finding it. Still learning how to assert boundaries, learning how to deal with emotions. Learning what some emotions are. It sucks, being in your thirties and still learning something as basic as some feelings. Hell my toddler is probably more emotionally aware and intelligent than I am, I wont begrudge her that but it would be nice to have been allowed feelings, to feel safe expressing them.

I digress.

The whole point is to say if journaling works for you, that’s great, you do you. I will find some kind of way to sort through the things in my head.