I started journaling in the fall of the year I finished my degree in economics. After graduating from college and leaving without concrete plans, a large amount of time became open to me. Instead of the hard task of looking for work, I picked up novels and began to read. This reading felt like a different kind of education had begun for me, diametrically different, from the education I had completed a few months prior. I was beginning to understand the importance of human emotions, and it led me to journaling — a useful activity, unlike the writing of this essay.
In novels, characters took the shape of real people, and although they were cast in skins and cultures more colorful than my own, I felt enormous sympathy toward them. I cared about what these people felt and thought, what they wanted, and about what happened when they couldn’t get what they wanted. These characters had an inner life in which I entered and lived as if they were my own: living once as a genial doctor in a provincial town, once as a married woman whose passions overwhelmed and killed her, once as a man with vast wealth pining over a past lover. It was this heightened awareness of the inner reality of other people that made me want to journal. If I was so invested in the feelings of these fictional people, why not look at the multitude of feelings I have personal experience with? Passion, desire, self-disgust, envy, shame. I wanted these emotions examined, worthy of examination. So it began, with a Moleskin journal.
Nothing in my personal history would have predicted such a pursuit. There are no journals lying around detailing my childhood experiences, the constant family moves between New York City and a small town in Indiana, or my difficulty, at times, of learning the English language. Re-reading my first journal, which dates from October 2013 to May 2014, the first page begins with a contemplative note: “How quickly time passes without so much as a courtesy warning. Did it occur to the lords of time that I may want to rest a bit?” Time was on my mind. But also the feeling of being lost and not knowing what I should be doing. Getting a job seemed impossible as I didn’t feel like I had any applicable skills for any career. After a week, I wrote about my decision to attend graduate school and the amount of preparations necessary to gain admittance. Looking back, it felt surreal that I was actually making plans for the first time in my life. I wrote down my feelings and started to make a decision on them. This process was a revelation, something I had never done in my life, something I continue to do. (Graduate school didn’t happen, even after taking the GRE, but that’s okay).
The first journal was a chronicle, frankly, of a dark period in my life. I am unsurprised by the underlying moods: melancholic, fearful, annoyed at someone (usually a family member), at something. I was an unhappy person with a limited set of ideas about the kind of life I should have. But then the characters in the novels I was reading gave me a new perspective to consider. That life is fundamentally an uncertain place. That we all got shit to deal with. And it made me feel better that I was not alone in my feelings of uncertainty about life. I learned to accept a greater deal of it both from reading novels and writing about it.
Not all the entries leaned toward sadness. I wrote when I was joyful about something, which often starts with a subway ride to Manhattan, a trip to Starbucks, followed by long, undirected walks to various neighborhoods. I would take great pleasure at seeing people talk to each other at corners in twos of the same flavor or in a group composed of heterogeneous members. With no defense against all the city’s liveliness, I would reach for my journal in the evening and describe the day and all the happy moments.
Apart from reviewing one’s feelings, it was nice to see that I started writing about my daily life. Some diarists, like Sylvia Plath, seem to be able to record an entire day, covering the places they went or traveled to, people they met, conversations heard. I have tried to compose a whole day but usually gave up halfway out of boredom. Living one’s day is tiring enough that I rarely feel a need to spend an evening or afternoon reconstituting moments into words. For that, I mostly prefer the convenience of vivid photos over pretty prose.
There are no rules on what you put inside your journal. My entries always varied in length, from two sentences to two pages. I could just be jotting down an idea, a question, a conversation I overheard on the subway. It does not matter how much you write, but it does matter that you take journaling seriously, like brushing your teeth each day. And it doesn’t require perfection at any level. There, you always have a willing and available confidant. Write what’s on your mind, your plans, your struggles, your hopes and lofty dreams, the things you wanted to say at the moment but held back saying them. None of it needs to be dressed up because the journal’s only visitor is yourself.
The greatest reward to journaling only comes years later. A few years of off and on journaling has made me a more honest person, less egotistical. I don’t mean that I was always being dishonest when talking to people but I was not able to tell the entire truth about myself. I was always trying to make myself seem better, presented a neater, cleaner version of my life than the actual messier circumstances in which I lived. When you have little confidence in yourself, you tend to act in a self-aggrandizing way. Inside a journal, there is no need for it. A journal is a safe zone where everything and anything said is permissible, and you are allowed to be as messy of a person as you know yourself to be. The world won’t fold and collapse on you if you tell the truths about yourself. You won’t be locked up for revealing dirty secrets, your family’s or your own. It is a place of shelter where there’s no penalty to express yourself accurately, comfortably in the manner you want. Journaling is one of the most freeing things you can do for yourself. You could be you.