Journaling for self hep and discovery: understand your feelings
I started journaling in a really dark place, honestly for a bunch of reasons, but mainly I was having problems at school and my mom and other two relatives I really cared about were having some serious health issues.
Before that, I never really felt the need to write down what I felt, but I was on a weird place where I didn't feel like I could talk to anyone about my feelings, but I felt waaaay too much. It just had to come out one way or another, and one day I was so angry and sad, I just took a notebook and started writing a bunch of things I was dealing with.
If I'm going to be honest, those notes were really hatefull and sad, and eventually I decided to throw them away because after that period of my life was over I didn't like reading it or knowing it was on my house. However, I really do think just being able to have an outlet to speak freely about my issues, without fear of judgment, helped a lot.
Nowadays, I keep a journal where I write whenever I feel alone or want to remember a specific moment, and that is definitely one of my favorite things, so I wanted to make this post with some tips to help anyone thinking about journaling for self help:
Don't censor yourself : Write what you actually feel, try to be as honest as possible independently on what you think of that. Weather your feelings seem selfish, exaggerated, or unfair, the objective of journaling is understanding how you feel, and watering down what you actually want to say will just confuse you and force you to bottle up your feelings even further. If you can look at what you wrote later and realizeit doesn't reflect the person you want to be, that's when you can start trying to understand where those unwanted thoughts come from.
Write for your future self: Sometimes in life you just get stuck on some vicious circles, where you know a person or a action is bad for you, but then the moment of realisation is gone and you go back to those unwanted habits. If you feel like you should cut somebody off, stop doing something, going somewhere or whatever you feel like you need out of your life, make sure whenever you have the initial feeling of "oh my God, this is actually not good for me" you journal about when and why you felt that way. Even if later it turns out you gave up on taking action, with time you will be able to identify patterns more easily. If you always feel a certain way after hanging out with someone for example, you can see more clearly how you actually feel about the relationship on the future.
Journal the good too! : whenever something good happens, you might not feel as inclined to write about it because good days don't really feel like a burden you have to get out of your chest. However, whenever you can remember to write down a good memory I highly suggest you do so, it turns your journal into a sort of "time capsule", and whenever you need to be reminded on how fulfilled you can feel, the memories will be there. Something I like to do is collect little things like tickets, notes, panflets, etc. That can remind me of the places I went and of my friends and family.
Reread what you wrote : I feel like this has been implicit this whole time, but it's good to make it clear. Take time to reread what you say and reflect on patterns and emotions. If you want to make notes about what you realised reading your journal, that's really good too! Take a look on what is making you happy or sad and think about what you can do in the future to deal with this situations. And, just as a side note: if you want to write something on the margins, DO IT. Don't let the pressure to have a perfect artsy journal get to you. Write with colorful pen and markers if you feel like it would make it better to look at
Don't make it a chore: if you don't feel like writing, don't. If you do, write however many pages you want independent of having something big to say or not. If you want to go on a four pages rant about the new album you just downloaded or the new series you started, do so. Journaling can also be a way go cheer you up! But if you don't feel like you have anything to say fo a week, don't peer pressure yourself into writing everyday. If you feel like you need more motivation to use your journal, just find something to log in there that you actually like, you can turn it into a planner/ journal hybrid so you can use it every day, keep your lists in there (especially movie/TV shows / book lists, since those normally the ones people get more exited about). You can even make it a doodle book.
If you want some prompts ideas or more journaling tips, here are some places you can find useful on YouTube:
Journaling for self discovery, journal flip through & how to journal for beginners
Make daily journaling a habit with these videos to spark your creativity!
Rashawnda James (linking her entire channel because her journaling Playlists doesn't have all of her journaling videos. She has a really cool series talking about journaling for depression, anxiety etc. And apparently she is a therapist, so if you are having trouble with that this is probably the best place)
Rashawnda Carey is a licensed mental health therapist. This channel is a place for people to learn about self help, mental health and life s
I hope you find this helpful and see some confort in journaling! Good luck in your self discovery path š
