Why Journal?

As long as I can remember, I have written in a journal. Throughout the years, I continued to write in journals. I’ve always liked the actual process of writing. I guess that would explain my current position as an English Instructor at several colleges.

I now work with my students and teach them to journal. The purpose of journaling within my classes is to encourage the students to express themselves through writing. Most times, people don’t like to write because they don’t know what to say, or they don’t know where to start. Some people even worry about being judged or corrected for their writing. Because of this, I always start with an exercise in getting rid of your inner critic.

We all have an inner critic in our heads that try to tell us we’re not good enough or we can do better than what we do. At the end of the exercise, I tell them to let go of that inner critic and allow themselves to be free of whatever they want to write in their journal entries. This then allows them to freewrite as they wish. In the journal entries, I’m not looking for grammar mistakes, misspellings, etc. I just want them to write about the first thing that comes to mind on the writing prompts I give them. At the end of each semester, I always get a number of students that state how helpful the journaling was to them.

Journaling can be very therapeutic. Often times, we tend to keep our thoughts, feelings, and emotions bottled up inside. By keeping them in, we are creating tension and stress on our bodies that we don’t need. Journaling is one way to get those thoughts, feelings, and emotions out. A lot of people say they don’t want to journal because they don’t want to share those thoughts, feelings, and emotions with others. You don’t ever have to share your journal with anyone if you don’t want to. But what if someone finds it and reads it? Well, you could always write out your thoughts, feelings, and emotions and destroy it right after. The idea is not to keep it all inside. It’s not healthy. Whether you choose to share your writing with others is completely up to you, but just writing it out is releasing all those thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Releasing them is letting them go, and letting them go is the start of healing when you’re going through any type of trauma within your life.

When I would journal during my first marriage, I would be worried that my husband may read my journals. Because of that, I never wrote anything that I thought would hurt him or anything I wasn’t able to admit to myself. The problem with this is it wasn’t my exact thoughts. It was a slightly different version, a version I was okay with sharing, but it wasn’t the true version. Once the divorce process started, I no longer cared if he saw it. In fact, I often hoped he would read it. I wrote all my feelings in there, and I didn’t hold back. I said/wrote whatever came to mind. That’s when I began to start my healing process.

Besides my regular journaling, I started to do art journaling, which is very similar to scrapbooking. Art journaling is a combination of journaling, scrapbooking, painting, etc. It’s pretty much whatever you want it to be. If you want to paint a picture and write over it later, then you can. If you want to glue a picture to a page and write a caption, song, poem, quote, or whatever next to the picture, then you can.

During my divorce, I decided I needed to start being true to myself moving forward. The art journaling helped me with this process. My first art journal has pages of positive days, pages of anger, pages of grief, and pages that seem very dark. It was whatever I felt on the days I chose to work in the art journal. Again, it was part of my healing process. I had a lot of thoughts, feelings, and emotions that I had to let out, for I was making myself physically and mentally ill by keeping it all bottled up inside. I was grieving the loss of my marriage and the life I would have to leave behind, so journaling and art journaling became my main ways to release and deal with this grief.

They say there are five stages of grief. Grief does not always take place after death, though. We will grieve throughout our lives for various reasons. In my case, with my divorce, I was grieving the loss of my marriage. I had been married for nine years, and we had dated for eight years prior. Of course, it doesn’t matter how long we were together; I was mourning the loss of my marriage, my relationship. So, I was working through those stages through journaling. Had I not journaled, I honestly don’t know that I would have healed or would be in the positive place I can say I’m in today, happily married to my husband, Joe. I’m so grateful for journaling and for how it allowed me to move on. Yes, there were other things that helped me as well, but I know journaling, whether it is art journaling or writing out my daily thoughts in a regular journal, helped me reach this positive place.

Anyone can benefit from journaling. I would encourage anyone to journal not only on a daily basis but definitely when you have something major or tragic going on in your life. You will be surprised at how much better you feel from just writing it all down. If you’re mad at someone, then write them a letter saying anything and everything that’s on your mind. Whether or not you ever give that letter to them, you have at least gotten it out. You have released it from yourself, and you will feel so much better. Give it a try!