Journaling

My whole life I’ve wanted to be the type of person who journals. My sister is this type of person–she always has a million notebooks that are full of drawings and notes and other things taped in. Growing up I was so jealous that she could keep up with that. I’d always get a pretty notebook or diary as a gift and vow that this as the time that I would start journaling every day. I’d make an entry that day and then the next day and maybe (if I was really lucky) it would continue for a week. Then a few weeks would go by and I’d remember that I was the type of person who journal now so I’d dig it back up and write another entry. My childhood bedroom probably had ten or so notebooks with about seven entries each. So eventually I gave up and came to terms with the fact that I’m just not a journal-er.

That’s part of the reason why I started bullet journaling. Yes, I needed a planner that was more flexible than traditional ones so I could keep track of my bar studying (bar as in the legal bar exam, not bar as in happy hour). But I also thought it could be a way to jot down little notes about what I’d been feeling or what I’d done that day–and it worked! My bullet journals are a pretty decent archive of what I’ve done over the past three years and I’ve been good about keeping them updated and writing in the important events or feelings of each day. But I still haven’t felt like I’ve fulfilled my life-long dream of being a ~person who journals~. I blame my sister for setting my expectations of how pretty a journal can be so high.

So when we started staying at home I thought maybe this would be a good time to kick things off again and try to become a journal-er. And since I’m so much older and wiser than 10 year old me, I figured I’d try to find something to help me more than my brain. (Since part of my struggle with journaling has always bee that I just have no idea what I’m “supposed” to be writing about.) Thankfully it would seem that many people had the same feeling as me! I was looking through Twitter and found this: The Isolation Journals. Every morning, writer Suleika Jaouad sends an email to this list with a new journaling prompt written by another writer or illustrator or someone who has great thoughts. (And don’t worry, they’re not all about how weird it is to be sitting in your house all day.) Now, I’ve only been doing this for the past six days so I haven’t fully gotten over the hump that stuck with me in my childhood, but I have a good feeling about this project.

I’ve been using the prompts as my journal entries each day. One of the things that I’m enjoying most about this is that they’re not all writing prompts. Some encourage you to draw your response–and some I just decide that I’m going to draw the response myself. I’m not a great artist but knowing that there are more people out there also drawing (likely) not great drawings in their journals alongside me helps.