I’m Not A Journaler. I Started Anyway.

I often teach about journaling inside of prisons. I usually start with the question: “How many of you have tried journaling?” Every hand in the room usually goes up. Then, I’d follow up with “and how many of you are still journaling today?”. The majority of the time, all the hands would go down.

When I asked them why they stopped, the answers are some version of the same thing. It felt silly, they didn’t know what to write, they’d start and think who do I think I am, or it felt like it was made for a different type of person.

I understood all of these reasons. I am not, by my own definition, a “diary person”.

Growing up I was a tomboy. The one who was playing football during 4th grade recess, not sitting around and sharing my feelings. I never let anyone see me cry. I was passionate and creative but in a shy way, scared of being judged or failing at whatever I was asked to try. Journaling felt fake, like something girls in movies did right before their older sibling found it and read it out loud at the worst possible moment.

I also didn’t think I had anything worth documenting. Like my thoughts were too ordinary to deserve space on a page. And on the days when something hard was actually happening, the last thing I wanted to do was sit down and write about it. I already ruminated about it enough in my mind, I didn’t need it on paper too.

So I wrote journaling off and moved on. 

The thing that actually changed my mind wasn’t journaling itself, it was gratitude. About five years ago I started small. Every evening, I would write dow I used bullet points that didn’t require full sentences, reflections, or any deep emotions. 

I began to look for things to put on the list. The good things started to register a little more than they had before because I knew I’d be writing them down later.  Three months in, I noticed my entries getting longer. Not because I was trying, but because I finally had more to say. 

Around that same time, I read The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma and Think Like a Monk by Jay Shetty. Both of them talked about journaling like it was a non-negotiable. I started to put more effort into my journaling and treated it like a practice. I stopped asking whether what I was writing was interesting or profound, and just put it all down.

I realized that the page wasn’t judging my entries, nobody was grading them, nobody even had to see them if I didn’t want them to.

If your journal is full of dark stuff, that’s okay…

A friend of mine started journaling and got worried because everything she was writing was negative, dark, or angry. She wanted to know if that was okay.

I asked her one question: does it help to get it out?

She said yes, but that she felt kind of drained afterward.

I told her to keep doing exactly what she was doing. Get the anger out and don’t edit or soften it. But then I challenged her to end with five gratitudes. Every single time. That way she got the hard stuff out of her system and reminded herself of what was still good.

That’s all journaling actually is. And it can take any shape you need it to.

How to start (in two minutes)

If you’re brand new to journaling, or you’ve tried it and quit, here’s where I’d begin.

Set a two-minute timer on your phone. Write down three things that you’re grateful for. They don’t have to be meaningful to anyone else, but they should be specific. 

Do that for two weeks without adding anything else. Let it become part of your daily routine. After a week, add one sentence like What am I feeling today? What’s on my mind? What do I need to say that I haven’t said out loud yet?"

That sentence eventually become a paragraph, and then that paragraph will become whatever it needs to be. You don’t have to fill the pages or be a writer. You just have to show up and write what’s actually there. 

Why I keep coming back to it.

I go back and read old entries sometimes. The ones from hard seasons, the happy ones, the ones where I clearly had no idea what was about to happen next. I get to watch myself figure things out across a series of entries. I get to see, in my own handwriting, the difference between who I was then and who I am now.

It’s evidence that you were here. 

The Creative Sentence is a self-paced emotional literacy and creative writing workbook built for exactly this. If the blank page has always felt like too much, we give you a place to start. Grab a free gratitude template [here].