Saying I have an “aversion” to journaling is a very mild way of putting things; I hate journaling, I’ve never liked it, and, frankly, I’m not sure I ever will. That may seem strange, as I am a self-proclaimed lover of “all things writing,” but allow me to explain myself and maybe help all the other non-journalists out there feel a little better too.
There’s a great deal of research showing that journaling has an insane amount of benefits for your mind and body. Journaling has been shown to help with reducing stress by allowing people to reflect on and understand their thoughts and feelings. In other words, journaling helps you to stand back from experiences and evaluate them on your own time. Journaling can help to improve your communication skills and increase your self-discipline, creativity, and mindfulness. Essentially, journaling is supposed to help you write your way to a better, more centered, more intelligent, and more creative self.
Don’t get me wrong, I love everything that journaling is about. As an artist I love the creativity of it, as a yogi I love how it nurtures mindfulness, and as a writer I love how it encourages writing and improves communication. That being said, I still hate journaling. For a long time, I beat up on myself over the fact that, despite my best attempts, I could not commit to journaling and did not enjoy it. I thought that I was doing something wrong, until I realized that, just like everything else in the world, journaling is not for everyone.
The way I see it, there are three main types of writers. First, you have writers who write things for their eyes and their eyes only. Second, you have writers who write things for other people to read. Third, you have writers who are any combination of the first and second types of writers put together. I am that second type of writer, I write because I want to start a conversation and share my perspectives and words with the world; I cannot write for myself to save my life.
One of the big themes of journaling is that you’re just supposed to let the words come out, not worrying about spelling of whether things are making sense, and just write. Sounds pretty easy, right? Not for me. As a writer, I fail at journaling because I am highly critical of my writing. Being critical of your own writing is great skill to have when you’re working on academic papers or other articles of writing that will be seen by the public eye because it means you have the ability to look at your work, recognize that some of it is absolute crap, and revise your work to improve it—this is not a good skill to have when you’re journaling.
My inability to turn off the critical portion of my brain, and my desire for my writing to be something clean and polished that I can share with the world meant that a 20 minute journaling session quickly turned into a two hour editing session. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just not a good thing in the case of journaling. So does being unable to journal make me a bad writer? No, not at all.
The whole point of journaling is not actually to journal, but rather to stand back and reflect on yourself as a person to get a better understanding of who you are and what the world means to you. Journaling is an outlet for emotions and stress that is supposed to help you let go of toxic thoughts and feelings that you are holding onto and feel good about yourself. Journaling doesn’t do that for me, but writing things for people to read does. It’s not that I—and anyone else, who can’t journal for that matter— am a bad writer or a bad person, we just have different ways of expressing ourselves.
Instead of journaling, I write essays and articles for other people to read. I also bake, create art, do yoga, and meditate. There are times, when I catch the stack of half used journals in my room out of the corner of my eye and wince, that I still feel bad about not being able to journal. Then I realize that I shouldn’t feel the need to try and force myself to do something that makes me unhappy when I have other ways of reflecting on my life that I enjoy. Isn’t that why life if about? Enjoy yourself, with, or without, a journal.
