I’m coming up on 4 years of journaling this month.
I can’t decide if it feels like I just started or if it has been forever since I picked up my first journal at TJMaxx and started writing.
To note (because I get asked this a lot), I didn’t just pick up my journal 4 years ago and start writing every single day since. It took some time to figure out how I was going to use my journal and when it served me best.
Come to find out, it was something I could benefit from doing every day and I’m getting close to journaling every day for the past 2 years.
I like to journal in the morning so it's been a lot of early mornings of showing up to write, check in with myself, and process what was going on in life.
My journals have seen a lot over the past 4 years.
A college graduation, breakups, 3 moves, the first 3 years of my supply chain career, starting a podcast & eventually a blog, many travels, the loss of family members & pets, a yoga teacher certification, a global pandemic and so much more packed into 11 journals over the past 4 years.
I wanted to write something in honor of this milestone. So I asked myself, “what is the 1 thing you want people to know about journaling?”
I’ve created a lot of resources around journaling in the past couple of years to help people start their own journaling practices. You can find a lot of these on my website.
While a lot of those resources are helpful, the one thing I want you to know is that journaling can be the home that you take anywhere. Home is wherever my journal is.
For all the things that change in life, it’s the place to come back to. I don’t think it is a location or attachment to a material thing, but more of coming back to yourself.
Even the mornings where life felt really hard and I was so anxious or depressed, journaling made life feel just a little more manageable.
And maybe that is what we are all looking for.
We aren’t looking for everything to be better or perfect, we just want to know that it is going to be manageable. That we are strong enough, capable enough, and maybe even sane enough to take on the day.
It is a place where we can first express our ideas, hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations, and maybe even the things we aren’t willing to say out loud.
It is a practice that can make you feel heard and seen, even if it is just being heard and seen by yourself. Listening and paying attention to what is really on your heart.
Have you tried a journaling practice? If so, what is your 1 take away from it? Let me know in the comments or send me an email.
