Journaling

I really, really love my journal. It started at the recommendation of my good friend Sumita back in August of 2018. It starts with three questions ripped from the School of Life’s Philosophical Meditation. Opinions on de Botton aside (I have some vague sense in the back of my mind that he is either weird or problematic and I can’t remember which, maybe both), the practice was small enough and compatible enough with what was going on in my life at the time that I just started doing it every day.

I spent about 6 months just rubbing away at the questions every morning: What am I currently anxious about? What am I upset about and with whom? What am I currently excited or ambitious about (maybe learning)?

On July 4th 2019 something in me exploded and a lot of feelings came out - where I would normally write about 1-2 short paragraphs, I released a full page of text about how I was feeling. I had gotten so good at numbing, minimizing and suppressing my feelings it took 6+ months to awaken them finally and they were just raging and overwhelming. I was especially touchy the month of July and it blossomed into a very long (in retrospect obvious) anxiety attack. I made it through with a lot of help from my girlfriend and friends, alienating some people along the way.

My journaling still continues and I am easily producing 2-3 pages a day at this point, sometimes going back in the middle of the day to excitedly lay out my thoughts and wrestle/caress them in the safe space of my Google Doc. There are some days I have produced 9+ pages. The most marked consequence of all of this is that writing of any kind - fiction, non-fiction, WhatsApp messages has become incredibly easy. There is little to no friction between my mind and the medium. I hope to achieve even higher levels of fluidity and friction. I can see that there have been jumps in output as time goes on, 6 months the first time, another jump 1 year after that. Perhaps 2 years of journaling will result in an entirely different level of comfort with the practice of writing.

I had previously journaled when I lived in Boston, but it was almost always after my emotional health had been devastated, so I only knew how to write about unhappy situations and the very act of journaling had been associated with profound grief. I look back on those, often disjointed, shreds of a journal left behind from those times and see someone very different - someone very afraid of writing for fear of being found out for the things they thought. I think that fear has slowly receded as I repeat the practice.