Journaling in practice
Every post needs a photo, so I thought this contemplative one of my 3-year-old son would do.
Writing is a big part of my life. Even when I’m quiet in public—as I have been for big stretches of the past decade—I’m never not writing behind the scenes. A lot of that writing takes the form of journaling: over the course of March 2022 alone, I’ve journaled over 30,000 words. The practice of journaling is so helpful to me that I wanted to share some of the specifics of how I go about it and some thoughts on why this habit has stuck when so many have fallen by the wayside.
I started journaling in earnest as a teenager. I remember sitting at the big beige desktop computer in my childhood bedroom typing out my thoughts each day. One year, I set a goal of hitting a certain word count in my journal—then a Word document, or maybe it was even Microsoft Works—every single day. I remember that to meet the goal when I was away from the computer, I brought a a paper notebook on a family roadtrip and would sit counting the words by hand each evening to make sure I hit the mark. I like to think I’ve softened up in some ways, but that intense drive (verging on perfectionism) is still a part of me; it’s just that persistent journaling is one of its healthier outlets.
Since college, my relationship to journaling has ebbed and flowed but never vanished completely. I find stream-of-consciousness writing to be an important tool for hearing myself think. Over time, I’ve realized that my default mode is to tune into what’s going on for other people—what they might be feeling, what’s going on with group dynamics, and what I would do in their shoes. Cycling through other people’s perspectives is automatic for me: it runs in a background thread of my mind and I can’t pause it without conscious effort. Journaling is a tool for tuning into myself. It gives me the peace of knowing instead of wondering. I spend a lot of time imagining what’s going on for other people, which helps create enough empathy that I’m able to ask better questions and sometimes make non-obvious leaps that open up deeper conversation. But, at the end of the day, I can never fully know what’s going on for them—I’m not inside their heads. But I do have full access to my own mind and heart, if only I take a moment to listen.
Private journaling has always worked well for me and is a comfortable home base. Over the past few years, though, I’ve developed another approach that works even better for me: journaling to a close friend. All of those 30,000 words I mentioned in March? I sent them to someone I care about. I feel lucky to have a friend who’s curious enough about my everyday that we can trade long emails back and forth on a daily (and sometimes twice-daily) basis. If I didn’t have a friend like that, I think I’d still find enough satisfaction in journaling to do it. But sharing my thoughts with someone who’s endlessly curious about my life makes it a lot more meaningful.
Here are a few shared journaling patterns that have stood the test of time for me:
No expectation of direct response: In our friendship, we have a norm that witnessing each other’s lives is enough; we never feel a need to reply line by line to each other’s writing.
Loose reciprocity: I love reading about the details of other people’s interior lives; this has always been true about me, and was a big part of the reason I studied history in college through the lens of diaries and letters. The best way for me to invite that level of depth is to go there myself, but my friend and I have a good understanding that direct reciprocity is unrealistic. It’s more undulating than that. Receiving a diaristic letter brings me back to the habit myself, causing me to hunt through my calendar for the next right opportunity to sit down at the page.
Audience of one: I’ve faded in and out of sharing my thoughts in public in real time. I can now recognize that the wider the potential audience, the more I fall back to considering other people’s perspectives as I write rather than centering on my own. With an audience of one, I’m able to tune into the perspective of being a compassionate witness to my own life.
Anchor in the present through sensory details: As a reader, my favorite writing is full of sensory details—rich descriptions of what the author sees, smells, feels, and all the rest. I value coziness and so I’m especially drawn to cozy writing about peaceful home scenes. When I journal, I try to write the kind of sentences I like to read, which helps me to appreciate the coziness and peace that can be present in my life when I really look. That peace is not always close at hand, but it’s available enough to matter. Tuning in to the sensory details of my surroundings helps me to be more present to my life as it is.
Double processing: Typically, I write these journal-style letters in one shot without re-reading them, then send to my friend (stray typos and all) and then immediately re-read it from the sent email screen. Something about seeing it in that permanent context helps me to get instant perspective on whatever I was thinking and feeling just a few moments before. I process my thoughts and feelings once as a writer and then a second time as a reader, which helps me move through the molasses of my mind more quickly.
Observation into introspection: A pattern I practice in journaling and use nearly every hour of my day in conversations is to first make an of-the-moment observation, then immediately follow it with a related question that wasn’t even on my mind until I made the observation. This is a skill I first learned through leadership coach training that’s proven invaluable in my life. In a journaling context, I’ll write a whole paragraph reeling off the details of a situation, then organically close with a note on whatever feelings are coming up. Then, I’ll open the next paragraph with a question about that feeling. For example, I might end a paragraph saying “Unfortunately, I feel stuck on this”—then open the next paragraph with “What feels stuck here?” or “What feels unfortunate about that?” and roll straight into some exploratory reflection. I’m able to move through a lot of subtle stuff that way, and it helps prime me to be a better listener the rest of the day.
First thing in the morning, or anytime: My first choice for when to journal is first thing in the morning. But my second choice is whenever I have a spare fifteen minutes. I find I always, always feel better and more grounded after journaling, and because of the norm in my friendship of “no expectation of direct response” (or immediate consumption) and my trust that more writing from me is always welcome, I’ll sometimes send journal-style letters two or even three times a day. When a lot’s going on, I find it helpful to move through each chapter of a busy day as though the chapter itself has a beginning, middle, end, and reset before what’s next. Frequent journaling helps with that.
Calendar meditation: When I don’t know what to write about but feel an urge to keep writing, I’ll pull up my calendar and start to note down what happened yesterday or what‘s coming up today, then observe any feelings that come up about that. Pulling up my calendar also enables me to take insights from writing and plop them straight onto my calendar as private events: reach out to this person, make time for much-needed rest here, and so on.
The way I journal is personal, but journaling is personal. Because it’s personal, it’s easy to treat the practice as private. But if it’s important to enough to do, it’s important enough to try to share. If journaling is a part of your life, too, I’d love to hear about the practices that work for you.