Multiple mental health professionals and teenage girls have touted the benefits of keeping a daily diary. Not only can you release your mind and soul from the trauma of the barista at Starbucks getting your order wrong or your girlfriend not texting you for a whole two hours, but it’s better for your sleeping habits than drowning your sorrows by binge-watching Netflix right before bed, at least if you’re journaling on paper. However, if you’re one of the more petty people out there, you may have noticed that journaling has not made you more at peace with the world but somehow even more bitter. These four explanations might explain your crushed expectations.
1. Watching your relationships dissolve
If you keep a journal continuously for more than a couple of months, you run the risk of watching your friendships collapse before your eyes. The process is often nondescript: a slow, creeping realization that your best friends don’t really love you. As you flip through the months, their name appears less and less frequently, but you can’t remember having a fight. All you know is that years ago, you two were going swimming or getting brunch almost every day, and now you only text each other when you can bother to remember. If you didn’t keep a permanent record of your life, you could realistically deceive yourself into thinking that you were never that close, but your own pen cruelly illuminates reality.
2. Realizing that you’re making the same mistakes
“Hey,” you think to yourself after failing your most recent test. “This seems eerily familiar.” When your tears have for the most part subsided, you dig out your journal from the sixth grade. Sure enough, this exact situation, fueled by your overconfidence and subsequent refusal to study, has happened before. There is no better way to recognize your complete lack of intellectual and emotional growth than to watch yourself fail over and over again. As Albert Einstein once (possibly) said, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Congratulations, Einstein thinks you’re insane.
3. Reliving the pain of someone wronging you years ago
Perhaps you’re looking for the date of your friend’s birthday, as you attended their party last year and, knowing that you wrote it down, can’t be bothered to commit the date to memory. As you skim the pages, you stumble across Christmas 2011. You revisit your list of presents for nostalgia’s sake and realize that the only presents your brother gave you that year were a bag of beans and a pair of fuzzy socks. Juxtaposed with the elaborate and quite generous present you gave him for his birthday three weeks ago, it feels like theft. On the positive side, at least you can keep your grudges straight and burning fresh in your memory until you exact your revenge.
4. Mourning your impossible dreams and lost potential
“Wow, I used to be so optimistic. I can’t believe that I thought I had a decent chance of going to Stanford. Oh, I remember when I thought I was going to publish that book. I wonder what happened to that. Who needs to go to a competitive school, anyway? Not me! Of course it’s because I don’t need the debt, not that I was rejected from every Ivy League…” And as you continue licking your fingers clean of Cheetos dust and clicking on the next episode on Netflix, you ask yourself why you even bother to keep a journal if nothing interesting has ever happened to you. There’s always the chance that you’ll become wildly successful, and you’ll feel strong and secure knowing that you’ve accomplished greatness despite the struggles of your past. But to be honest, is that really likely?
