For much of my childhood and adolescence, I repeatedly tried and failed to keep a journal. I loved the idea of them; I've always been a big fan of ritual, and I could just picture myself sitting at some ornately carved desk with my leather-bound journal every evening, drinking tea and writing my incredibly profound thoughts with a smooth, black-ink pen.
Of course, that's not how things worked out. Over the course of several years, I bought journal after journal, only to fill a few pages with middle school crush confessionals and vague debriefings of uninteresting days before I abandoned the idea altogether for another month or two. This cycle continued from somewhere around sixth grade all the way to my senior year in high school, but then something in my mind must have shifted. One day last spring, I picked up a small, wire-bound notebook with a pear on the front cover, and I just started writing. The next day, I wrote again. And the next, and the next, and the next. Before I knew it, I had been writing every day for a month. So I kept going.
All these months later, I've filled journal upon journal with my barely-legible cursive, and it's helped me so much. It's made it easier for me to work through things I'm stressing over, wondering about, or dwelling on. Instead of just letting something stew in my mind, I write about it. It's also a great place to keep track of my ideas; there are pages and pages of potential article topics, quotes I love, songs I want to remember to listen to, to-do lists, really anything and everything I need or want to have on hand.
Above all, though, I journal to document my life. One of my biggest fears is growing old and frail and not remembering what it was like to be 18 or 20 or 30. I'm terrified to forget, so I write to remember. I write about the good days, as though I could capture the happiness in the pages and store it for bad times to come.
But I write about the bad days, too, and all the ones in between. I write about important milestones in my life, like graduating high school or moving to New York, and I write about days where nothing particularly interesting happens.
Even now, it's fascinating to go back to old journals and read about what I was thinking and doing last year; I can't imagine what it will be like years from now to look back on my senior year of high school.
So, in light of all this, I want to encourage everyone to start writing in a journal. Of course, starting is the hardest part--it's easy to feel like everything you write is boring or pointless. But you don't have to be spitting straight genius from the get-go (or ever, really--we all know I'm not); instead, just write about your day. Did something interesting happen? Great, write about it. Did you have the most generic, unremarkable day of your life? Great, write about that, too. Write about people you saw, friends you talked to, where you went, what you ate, a song you listened to, a book you read, a movie you watched, a cat you petted. Write about everything. If there's one thing journaling has taught me, it's that no detail is too small to write about, because maybe in five, 10, 20, or 50 years you'll come across an old journal, and you'll love reading about the most mundane moments of your freshman year of college.
