Why should you journal?

I wrote my first journal entry on February 3, 2001 in a Lisa Frank journal with two penguins hugging on the cover.  It took me six years to finish that first journal.  I would lose it for extended periods of time, find it and write every day for a brief period, and then stick it in some tucked away corner until the next escapade.

It wasn’t until middle school that I started journaling in earnest.  My parents divorced when I was five years old and I have no memories of the time when they were together, at least none that I can consciously tag as such.  When I was twelve, already neck-deep in adolescent introspection, this scared me.  I was afraid I wouldn’t remember anything from my life and so I decided to write it all down.  I was pretty good during this time, writing as much of what had happened as I could remember, but it came to a point when trying to get down two weeks worth of life in one night just wasn’t cutting it.  And so, as of March 22, 2008, I started to journal every night.

Sure, there were days when I simply texted myself a sentence, wrote it in later, and called that an entry.  There were other days when I woke up at 2 am with my heart racing because I had just realized that I hadn’t journaled yet.  There was even one where I woke up at 6 am after dancing all night and wrote then (I tell myself it still counts because I went back to sleep afterwards).

But now, six years and over 2,000 days later I am on my twenty-second journal and going strong.

That’s not to say that I haven’t asked myself why the hell I take anywhere from ten to forty five minutes out of my life every night to hand write some scrawling notes that, in all likelihood, no one will ever read. In fact, earlier this month I looked at my journal on March 7th and didn’t see anything from the night before, when I had been doped up on Nyquil after my second awful cold in a month. My heart started racing but after a few moments of carefully checking the calendar, I wrote two pages worth of introspection about how I don’t really need my journal any more, how I’m not scared that I won’t remember things, etc.  Then I flipped the page and there was the entry from March 6th.  Underneath it I wrote, ‘NEVERMIND. SIX YEARS STRONG.”

I guess I wasn’t as well adjusted as I thought.

You see, journaling has become an incredibly important part of my life for a number of different reasons.

1.)  If you ask my what I was doing on any day from March 22nd, 2008 to now, I could tell you.  For example, on August 23, 2009 I was feeling bad about crashing my mom’s car into an island during one of my first driving excursions so she woke me up with a donut.  And I think that’s pretty cool (not the crashing part, you know what I mean.)

2.)  You know how everyone says, “Well I certainly didn’t act like that when I was your age!” and you think to yourself “Yea, right,” while smiling politely?  Well if I ever catch myself doing that, I can go back and read exactly how I felt when I was fourteen or twenty or thirty five (when I get there).  How angry I was at fourteen whenever someone treated me like a child or belittled what I felt where huge accomplishments.

3.)  I have at least a moment everyday of forced introspection which, as an extrovert, is very important.  I have gotten to know myself, to understand the way I see the world, so much better through dedicating a moment to my thoughts every night.

4.) It’s taught me the power of a habit.  After six years I literally cannot fall asleep if I have not written in my journal.  To think that a creative act like writing could be as deeply wired into me as say, brushing my teeth or putting on my glasses makes me marvel every time I think of it.

5.) Some day, these journals will be a psychologists or anthropologists dream.

So why should you journal?  The best answer I have comes from a conversation with a professor who didn’t actually teach me.  We were walking around Fresh Pond and he told me not just to be the actor in my own life, but to be the author of my own life.  Author’s have a unique role, part plotter, part God, part clueless follower.  They hold their arms around the character and gently try to lead them in the right direction, although sometimes that’s not where the characters want to go and if that’s the case your characters will make it very clear.

By journaling every night, I am literally writing the story of my life.  Yes, it maybe in retrospect, but it makes me think about the blank pages that are coming up.  What will I write there once I’ve already lived through what I’m writing today?  How can I plan for that?  How can I help shape the arc of my own character development?

And how can you?