This post might sit better on Medium, but I’ll write it for this page first.
I have been doing journalling practices for a very long time. Perhaps since I was a child, and the idea of a diary impressed me a lot. I might also attribute it to books I read, written in the form of a diary, and tracing someone’s life through daily thoughts, emotions, and activity seemed to resonate deep with me. So I started writing.
But whenever I looked back on my writing, it seemed stupid. Mostly, ‘Why did I think this was a good idea to write, or to put into words?’ I struggled with this emotion, and yet, I knew there was something deeper with writing I needed to hit. I wasn’t really striking “reflection gold” just yet. So I kept on writing.
I’ve got a stack of journals over the past 10 years, maybe a little bit longer. It’s not that I wrote every day, but I wrote often enough. Often enough might just be quarterly; I would note for myself on my journal “It has been three months since I last wrote in here.” Sounds like a stupid point to make, but it’s a point to readjust my time frames, and to give myself a little forgiveness today if I missed writing for a month or two.
What I realised is that the journals highlight the concerns of my heart then. The more I pour what I am feeling into the journal, the more it makes sense. As I look through the past, I see that my heart was torn between what I should be doing, and what I want to do. I see the pettiness that I struggled with past colleagues, friends, or even family. I recognise points of personal change I wanted to make, and now, I might have made already. The journals have become a ruler for me to measure my own emotional height with. How much have I grown since?
Sometimes, I hit a touch of nostalgia, missing the past. Missing what I thought were good and great times. Looking through my journals also brings some perspective to remember it wasn’t always great. The grass isn’t always greener, but it just appears to be. The present is what actually matters, because I can do something about it today.
I feel a lot, and I think everyone feels a lot. Recording them down in my journals gives me the space to understand myself later, better. It’s silly sometimes, to see how ridiculous my priorities were. But at least now I can see it for myself. And at least now, I can learn not to be that ridiculous anymore.
So I write.