As I write in my upcoming book, journaling changed/saved my life during a difficult time in my 30s. Putting words on paper helped me figure out a way forward and then to stay the course when that way forward got (really) hard.
Tell me about your experiences with journaling.
Do you journal and, if so, why? How has it helped you in your life? Can you share a specific example?
When my husband became ill I started journaling-I never had before. He ended up in ICU for 5 months, had cancer and respiratory problems. It started to help with the stress but turned into a medical log that helped me keep everything that was going on straight. He was delusional thru most of the 7 months he was in the hospital. Ended up coming home to hospice for a week and passed away. It was an outlet that saved me and allowed me to get my frustrations out and helped me to go back and learn from what I wrote and experienced. Its coming up on a year. On strong days I go back and read my entries. I can’t believe how much it helped me.
I'm 43 and started journaling when I was 7, but switched over to blogging in my late 20s as a replacement for my journals. I find when it comes to recall, having things written allows me to naturally remember more vs. having to pull the journals to recall what happened. Something about the practice of writing seems to be a memory boost. I appreciate seeing the throughlines from my childhood til now. My children, ages 9 and 13, also get a kick out of seeing how I was at their ages! I feel like it makes them feel more connected/empathetic towards me as a mom.
I love the way you have evolved with your journals and how writing has helped as a memory boost. Everything I do is about that exact concept, finding the throughlines... Love that your kids appreciate you even more with this added gift being able to see who you were when you were their age.
Journaling has truly gotten me through some of the darkest moments of my life — the death of my mother when i was just 24; the loss of 3 beloved young women family members to cancer in the span of 2 weeks; the loss of people I’ve loved who’ve chosen to exit my life; growing and evolving as a woman and parent.
Shannon, I know you too are a lover of metaphor (i jokingly call myself a metapwhore 😂) but I liken my writing process to a “centrifuge” — it’s where i dump all my thoughts, spin them around, process them and the crap settles to the bottom and the good stuff breaks through to the top! Another great one I’ve heard is comparing journaling to “metabolizing” your thoughts/life. I truly can’t understand things about myself until i write my way through them.
In terms of process as opposed to substance, i have different approaches and pick whichever feels most useful given how I’m feeling and what I’m trying to understand. Sometimes it’s Julia Cameron’s/Artist’s Way Morning Pages where i dump three pages of stream of consciousness into my journal. I know that this will: 1) relieve some of the anxiety just getting it out of my head and onto a page; and 2) even though it’s stream of consciousness, that centrifuge will begin its work of separating the junk sediment from the good stuff and over time deeper thoughts will emerge. My 3 best metaphors for this approach would be: 1) word vomiting which helps get the emotional “bile” out; 2) I’ve also heard Julia’s morning pages described as “windshield wipers for your soul” to clean the muck out and help you see better; and 3) Liz Gilbert calls these kinds of musings the “breadcrumbs” that — if you follow them — can lead to more profound discoveries.
Sometimes this approach doesn’t feel deep enough, so when I’m feeling like I’m ready to move from the word dump to the connecting-of-dots phase, I’ll shift to prompts. These tend to be one of 3 ways for me (lol you can tell I’m a reformed lawyer because everything is 3 bullet points 😂). First is i keep a notebook where i just write cool writing prompts i come across over time, one per blank page and will read those through to find one that feels like it will be a good vehicle for what im wanting to process. Secondly, Liz Gilbert’s new Letters from Love tool has been a godsend and has lead to some transformational learning and healing for me and as a great tool to share with others. Thirdly, i have certain triggers dating back to my childhood that I’ve come to be aware of through years of therapy. So i will often analyze what’s bothering me through the lens of that awareness to see how i may be distorting or imposing a story on a situation to my and others’ detriment.
I started journaling four years ago when it finally dawned on me that my life had to change drastically. I found the strength to end a marriage that had become unbearable, to get my two younger daughters (who both suffered from severe mental problems) out of this situation and start afresh. This would not have been possible without journaling. And I keep doing this regularly, more or less in bullet journal style, and it keeps me going and steering in the right direction! And my daughters are doing fine now, for which I am so grateful.
For 500 days of the pandemic I kept a COVID Journal (what my husband called my Doomsday Diary) where I doodled what happened in our life and in the world. It was surprising to realize that despite all of the fear and anxiety and disappointment, we were still having fun.
If you want to take a peek, I gathered some pictures in a series of blog posts:
I started journaling before I was 10. Didn't realize then how significant or crucial it was. I also didn't understand that it was a vehicle for the guidance that I've always relied on. Over the years the journaling morphed and the voices coming through became clearer and 5 decades later, here I am with a storage unit full of journals that one day someone will either peek through to figure out who the heck I was or burn them (-;
I have been journaling since I was a kid. It started with lock-and-key diaries and now I just email myself daily with thoughts. Journaling helps me clear my mind and processing anything that's nagging at me so that I can then launch forward into the rest of my day. It helps me center myself and feels like nurturing a relationship with myself. As I write, it's like a knot becoming loosened and at the end, I have these distinct threads I can see clearly.
After years of journaling in fits and starts, I borrowed a friend's strategy: every morning, I pull a tarot card and treat it as a journaling prompt. It solves the "where to start?" problem and helps me tap into what's going on under the surface. I usually do it right after meditation, when my conscious mind isn't fully online yet, and what comes up is frequently surprising. The habit has stuck for about 5 years now, and it feels weird to start a day without it. I've journaled my way through covid, personal disasters, relationships challenges, and amazing, formative experiences. Giving myself space to process and explore without the forced structure of a "Dear Diary"-type log of the day-to-day has been transformational.
I've journaled since I was 7, it's always been an outlet for me. I've found that I tend to need to verbally process things, everything. I'll find myself sending 10 minutes of snapchats to my best friends just explaining the errands I'm running and every thought that pops up along the way. And that's what journaling has often seemed to be for me- a place to just dump out everything. One interesting thing that I notice is I tend to have trouble journaling about really bad things, that it hurts in a way to immortalize them on paper?
Writing my thoughts has always been an outlet for me, since 6th grade. I feel it improves my memory of the important things and enables me to see honestly who I am. I probably will not share them with anyone at the end of my life but rereading them now is like a journey into my past. Currently I use journaling as a log of travel experiences, medical and personal highlights, and current world events.
I started by writing how I was feeling down on pieces of paper and slotting them inside a book. Wrote every couple of months and then got a notebook and moved to that. I realised when I looked back on my pages and my notes that I had attempted to moderate alcohol half a dozen times. I was struggling with anxiety and knew I was drinking too much but journaling helped me see the pattern. I'm now 10 months sober.
Journaling also helped me see how much better I felt after taking HRT. I use the process to lay down my thoughts and feelings and then go back to them when I'm trying to figure something out.
I do morning pages every morning since I started three(ish) years ago. I used to have a diary as a kid that I took great lengths to hide. I journaled periodically through my adult years but didn't feel safe to write my truest feelings until I did The Artist's Way.
I wake up on the page as I sip my first coffee and write. I truly feel like it helps put my troubles aside for the day. It can help me figure out the weird dreams. It can sort out how I feel about those matters that tend to repeat themselves.
Like a lot of people I started writing a journal in March 2020. I kept at it, writing in it daily, until July 2021 or so. I remember it helped me process everything around me at the time, but now, every time I try to go back and look at it, I’m horrified and put it away.
My mom wrote in a diary. When her mother betrayed her privacy and read her diary entries to her card-playing friends, mom stopped writing. She made sure I could write in a diary and gave me my first diary when I was 12. I picked it up then. It gathered steam when I moved into positions of leadership and could keep my sanity when writing. I've found, the longer I write or the more thoroughly I explore something that is bothering me, a very strong and calm voice of guidance comes through and I'm no longer confused. I have continued with it to this day.
David Viscott told me on his national television program that anything I could say in a diary I should be saying to the people in my life. Now, I find it fascinating, how I'm called to find a certain day and can find what I wrote about what I was doing that day. It becomes quite magical to have this at hand and a process of seeing the throughlines as Angie C mentioned in her comment.
I can't say enough about the benefits of writing in a diary. So excited you are writing a book about this subject.
When my husband became ill I started journaling-I never had before. He ended up in ICU for 5 months, had cancer and respiratory problems. It started to help with the stress but turned into a medical log that helped me keep everything that was going on straight. He was delusional thru most of the 7 months he was in the hospital. Ended up coming home to hospice for a week and passed away. It was an outlet that saved me and allowed me to get my frustrations out and helped me to go back and learn from what I wrote and experienced. Its coming up on a year. On strong days I go back and read my entries. I can’t believe how much it helped me.
I'm 43 and started journaling when I was 7, but switched over to blogging in my late 20s as a replacement for my journals. I find when it comes to recall, having things written allows me to naturally remember more vs. having to pull the journals to recall what happened. Something about the practice of writing seems to be a memory boost. I appreciate seeing the throughlines from my childhood til now. My children, ages 9 and 13, also get a kick out of seeing how I was at their ages! I feel like it makes them feel more connected/empathetic towards me as a mom.
I love the way you have evolved with your journals and how writing has helped as a memory boost. Everything I do is about that exact concept, finding the throughlines... Love that your kids appreciate you even more with this added gift being able to see who you were when you were their age.
Thank you! I'd love to inspire my kids to journal too. We'll see!
Journaling has truly gotten me through some of the darkest moments of my life — the death of my mother when i was just 24; the loss of 3 beloved young women family members to cancer in the span of 2 weeks; the loss of people I’ve loved who’ve chosen to exit my life; growing and evolving as a woman and parent.
Also highly recommend this book — https://a.co/d/fZhiH2M
Shannon, I know you too are a lover of metaphor (i jokingly call myself a metapwhore 😂) but I liken my writing process to a “centrifuge” — it’s where i dump all my thoughts, spin them around, process them and the crap settles to the bottom and the good stuff breaks through to the top! Another great one I’ve heard is comparing journaling to “metabolizing” your thoughts/life. I truly can’t understand things about myself until i write my way through them.
In terms of process as opposed to substance, i have different approaches and pick whichever feels most useful given how I’m feeling and what I’m trying to understand. Sometimes it’s Julia Cameron’s/Artist’s Way Morning Pages where i dump three pages of stream of consciousness into my journal. I know that this will: 1) relieve some of the anxiety just getting it out of my head and onto a page; and 2) even though it’s stream of consciousness, that centrifuge will begin its work of separating the junk sediment from the good stuff and over time deeper thoughts will emerge. My 3 best metaphors for this approach would be: 1) word vomiting which helps get the emotional “bile” out; 2) I’ve also heard Julia’s morning pages described as “windshield wipers for your soul” to clean the muck out and help you see better; and 3) Liz Gilbert calls these kinds of musings the “breadcrumbs” that — if you follow them — can lead to more profound discoveries.
Sometimes this approach doesn’t feel deep enough, so when I’m feeling like I’m ready to move from the word dump to the connecting-of-dots phase, I’ll shift to prompts. These tend to be one of 3 ways for me (lol you can tell I’m a reformed lawyer because everything is 3 bullet points 😂). First is i keep a notebook where i just write cool writing prompts i come across over time, one per blank page and will read those through to find one that feels like it will be a good vehicle for what im wanting to process. Secondly, Liz Gilbert’s new Letters from Love tool has been a godsend and has lead to some transformational learning and healing for me and as a great tool to share with others. Thirdly, i have certain triggers dating back to my childhood that I’ve come to be aware of through years of therapy. So i will often analyze what’s bothering me through the lens of that awareness to see how i may be distorting or imposing a story on a situation to my and others’ detriment.
I started journaling four years ago when it finally dawned on me that my life had to change drastically. I found the strength to end a marriage that had become unbearable, to get my two younger daughters (who both suffered from severe mental problems) out of this situation and start afresh. This would not have been possible without journaling. And I keep doing this regularly, more or less in bullet journal style, and it keeps me going and steering in the right direction! And my daughters are doing fine now, for which I am so grateful.
For 500 days of the pandemic I kept a COVID Journal (what my husband called my Doomsday Diary) where I doodled what happened in our life and in the world. It was surprising to realize that despite all of the fear and anxiety and disappointment, we were still having fun.
If you want to take a peek, I gathered some pictures in a series of blog posts:
https://www.potuspages.com/blog/doomsday1
My teenager recently asked me to start up again on a smaller scale for another 500 days, but I've had a harder time fitting it in now.
I started journaling before I was 10. Didn't realize then how significant or crucial it was. I also didn't understand that it was a vehicle for the guidance that I've always relied on. Over the years the journaling morphed and the voices coming through became clearer and 5 decades later, here I am with a storage unit full of journals that one day someone will either peek through to figure out who the heck I was or burn them (-;
I have been journaling since I was a kid. It started with lock-and-key diaries and now I just email myself daily with thoughts. Journaling helps me clear my mind and processing anything that's nagging at me so that I can then launch forward into the rest of my day. It helps me center myself and feels like nurturing a relationship with myself. As I write, it's like a knot becoming loosened and at the end, I have these distinct threads I can see clearly.
One of my first poems: Spaced differently than substack can allow...
A terror in my chest. It's like a knot, getting tighter and tighter. The harder my mind tries to untie it, the tighter the know becomes.
I'm scared...
I don't like what I feel, and the sad this is I'm afraid of the thing I need the most.
I feel the same about being able to see distinct threads
After years of journaling in fits and starts, I borrowed a friend's strategy: every morning, I pull a tarot card and treat it as a journaling prompt. It solves the "where to start?" problem and helps me tap into what's going on under the surface. I usually do it right after meditation, when my conscious mind isn't fully online yet, and what comes up is frequently surprising. The habit has stuck for about 5 years now, and it feels weird to start a day without it. I've journaled my way through covid, personal disasters, relationships challenges, and amazing, formative experiences. Giving myself space to process and explore without the forced structure of a "Dear Diary"-type log of the day-to-day has been transformational.
I started journaling a long time ago, and I still believe LiveJournal was the best website we've ever known.
(I met you via Twitter, which is huge, but I met my wife on LJ.)
Journaling and walking kept me sane during lockdown and, while I got away from both in 2023, it has helped me enormously in 2024.
I've journaled since I was 7, it's always been an outlet for me. I've found that I tend to need to verbally process things, everything. I'll find myself sending 10 minutes of snapchats to my best friends just explaining the errands I'm running and every thought that pops up along the way. And that's what journaling has often seemed to be for me- a place to just dump out everything. One interesting thing that I notice is I tend to have trouble journaling about really bad things, that it hurts in a way to immortalize them on paper?
Writing my thoughts has always been an outlet for me, since 6th grade. I feel it improves my memory of the important things and enables me to see honestly who I am. I probably will not share them with anyone at the end of my life but rereading them now is like a journey into my past. Currently I use journaling as a log of travel experiences, medical and personal highlights, and current world events.
I started by writing how I was feeling down on pieces of paper and slotting them inside a book. Wrote every couple of months and then got a notebook and moved to that. I realised when I looked back on my pages and my notes that I had attempted to moderate alcohol half a dozen times. I was struggling with anxiety and knew I was drinking too much but journaling helped me see the pattern. I'm now 10 months sober.
Journaling also helped me see how much better I felt after taking HRT. I use the process to lay down my thoughts and feelings and then go back to them when I'm trying to figure something out.
I do morning pages every morning since I started three(ish) years ago. I used to have a diary as a kid that I took great lengths to hide. I journaled periodically through my adult years but didn't feel safe to write my truest feelings until I did The Artist's Way.
I wake up on the page as I sip my first coffee and write. I truly feel like it helps put my troubles aside for the day. It can help me figure out the weird dreams. It can sort out how I feel about those matters that tend to repeat themselves.
It is a non negotiable start to my every day.
Like a lot of people I started writing a journal in March 2020. I kept at it, writing in it daily, until July 2021 or so. I remember it helped me process everything around me at the time, but now, every time I try to go back and look at it, I’m horrified and put it away.
My mom wrote in a diary. When her mother betrayed her privacy and read her diary entries to her card-playing friends, mom stopped writing. She made sure I could write in a diary and gave me my first diary when I was 12. I picked it up then. It gathered steam when I moved into positions of leadership and could keep my sanity when writing. I've found, the longer I write or the more thoroughly I explore something that is bothering me, a very strong and calm voice of guidance comes through and I'm no longer confused. I have continued with it to this day.
David Viscott told me on his national television program that anything I could say in a diary I should be saying to the people in my life. Now, I find it fascinating, how I'm called to find a certain day and can find what I wrote about what I was doing that day. It becomes quite magical to have this at hand and a process of seeing the throughlines as Angie C mentioned in her comment.
I can't say enough about the benefits of writing in a diary. So excited you are writing a book about this subject.