the joy of journaling

Hello dearest reader, I hope you’ve been well! It has been a slight minute since I’ve posted.

My last post was a triumphant declaration of my determination to love myself wholly and completely and put myself first.

I have indeed been trying to embody that! I’m doing my therapy, journaling my feelings, and doing nice things for myself.

Something exciting that has happened in my life is I started The Artist’s Way!!!!

If you are unfamiliar, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron about recovery from creative burnout.

I am only on day 6 of week one but I highly recommend it! I may have peeked at further week’s exercises while reading it for the first time because I had done all of week one’s and wanted even more.

Two staples of the artist’s way are morning pages and artist dates.

Artist dates are a scheduled block of time where you, just you, indulge yourself in something creatively fulfilling. You can take yourself out on an actual date, like say to a museum or a coffee shop where you can people watch, or just spend time at home doing something you love like painting or watching your favorite movie.

I unintentionally fulfilled my first artist date just yesterday, where I spent hours playing the Happy Home Paradise DLC of Animal Crossing New Horizons.

If you are unfamiliar with that as well, it is where you design homes for all of the various villagers in the game of Animal Crossing!

It is incredibly creatively fulfilling for me to be able to design these houses based on whatever theme and parameters I am given, I was having a blast last night.

And I finally “beat” the DLC last night! There’s no actual beating of it, unless you complete everything, but after 30 houses you are awarded things.

One thing it gave me that filled me with IMMENSE joy was new dance emotes!

I can’t tell you how long I spent just standing there dancing with the villagers on the island. I was yelling with glee upon my first discovery of all the different moves, and was just ecstatic the whole time. Genuinely brought me so much joy.

Here is a clip of my epic moves if you feel so inclined to watch: (volume warning)

So that was my artist’s date this week!

Now onto the part of this process I have really fallen in love with: morning pages!!!!!

Morning pages are 3 pages of stream of consciousness writing, ideally done as soon as you wake up.

Now don’t get me wrong, my love for them doesn’t mean they come easy to me. My first set of morning pages took me a few hours to complete because I was staying at my sister’s house so I was surrounded by family and a little distracted and couldn’t think of things to write.

There’s not a single time I have written morning pages and not at least once commented on the fact that I don’t know how I’m going to fill three pages.

And yet I do it! I’ve done it, 6 times already! 18 pages!

Yesterday’s morning pages were mostly about animal crossing and how excited I was to play again. There’s no rules to morning pages, except that you complete them!!!

I don’t have the book with me to quote her directly, but I remember her mentioning something about learning to rest on the page.

I love this. I think it’s accurate too, you learn to rest through writing your thoughts out on each page, it’s a moment of stillness and introspection.

Even if you can’t do them first thing in the morning, or you’re watching tv as you do them, whatever it is, I think it’s most important that you just DO them. Completely.

And it’s hard to explain but writing morning pages, as dull as they can be, has given me the utter ITCH to keep writing and writing.

It’s gotten me back into the habit of journaling consistently, and it makes me want to dive deeper. I want to get into the nitty gritty of my thoughts and emotions and motives and ideals. I wanna know it all baybee!!

So I have decided to finally pick something back up that I have not done for a long time: a physical diary.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been journaling digitally for like 5 years now, but it just isn’t the same.

I think of the physical pages I find that I wrote as a child or young teenager, and how connected to them I feel.

You can’t get that same type of connection through text on a screen. It just isn’t the same as seeing the words and emotions articulated with each stroke of the pen. The human connection you feel to yourself or someone else through their flawed handwriting.

I miss that rawness. That vulnerability. Too long now I’ve been journaling about my life on the surface, but never truly diving deep.

I want to dive straight into uncharted waters. I want to sift through the murkiness that is my deepest inner turmoil.

I used to journal about my feelings, about the struggles I was facing. I still do that to some degree, but the sense of dissociation that has carried me through my most traumatic times keeps me from getting too deep. Maladaptive coping mechanisms and all that.

I’m ready to face my wounds. To nurse them back to health through love and care and a listening ear. I want to make myself feel heard.

The journal I picked for my diary is really special. It is one my mother bought me ages ago and I had never used.

A beautiful paperblanks brand journal with metal clasps and a glittery cover.

It feels poetic in a way. My mother gifting me a safe space, with my secrets guarded by the gentle metal clasps. It was the perfect choice.

I felt so excited to get started writing my first entry.

Note my new mug, which I am obsessed with.

And my favorite pen, which I originally got so I could have smaller Korean handwriting. A Sharpie S Gel .38.

I love the small pen because I write small myself, and it’s smooth and doesn’t smudge at all. A perfect win!

I was faced with a world of possibility on the first page I was to be writing on.

Excuse the blurriness, but of course I had to greet my diary as I greet any reader. I do this regularly in my online journals as well. I don’t address the journal directly usually, I just say hello. I like to do this as if I’m speaking to my future self looking back on these entries. It’s a cute idea to me hehe.

I actually really love what I ended up writing for the first page. I wrote all about my desires for the outcome of the diary and how I promised to be there for myself.

It’s not so dreadfully personal so I will be brave and share it here with you all. I trust you after all hehe.

This passage has remnants of the writer I used to be, I see her shining through the cracks of each sentence. I hope to break her free completely someday.

I was writing in my morning pages this morning about hoping to unlock the inner poet in me again someday, as the words are on the tip of my tongue but just refuse to be spoken.

This is what I love so much about writing and journaling. Through writing to myself I am healing my inner writer, my inner poet, my inner artist. I am giving her a voice she had long since lost.

I’ve also become hyperfixated on watching videos about journaling and journaling ecosystems. I want to make my own videos soon!

There’s just something so beautiful to me in seeing women who take solace in their own words, how it’s such a delicate and holy and raw and real experience we all share. So many of us have run from heartbreak straight to the page. We have a shared heartache.

I just love it. It’s so fun to listen to girls speak on their love for journaling, the different types of journaling the do, why they do it. Everyone is so unique yet so similar. I find comfort in our camaraderie.

So yeah, I’m completely and utterly hyperfixated on journaling at the moment and I have no regrets.

Speaking of journaling and journaling ecosystems I mentioned, I have added something new to my journaling ecosystem: a commonplace book!

I have always loved the idea of a commonplace book, but strayed away from it due to the organized nature of others books I had seen. Having neat sections for specific topics was too much rigidness for me in the pages of a journal I love to so chaotically populate.

Before I get any farther, a common place book, most simply put, is a common place for all the knowledge and ideas you learn.

You can compile quotes, lyrics, recipes, ideas, book notes, anything from an outside source that you wish to document and keep.

My compromise for having a commonplace book without the rigid organization is an index, with a topic for each page I’ve written in.

This way I can go from writing about love to dinosaurs back to love and then to friendship and then the evolution of jellyfish without worry. (I have written about none of these subjects yet, but they’re not bad ideas.)

The first page is populated with questions to ask about media you consume, which I got from victoria frankenstein’s video, “improve your philosophical thinking with a media journal“

and the little notebook in the first picture serves as a mini commonplace that I can use on the go, but also as a place for ideas on WHAT to commonplace and my own lil ideas and thoughts that don’t quite fit in the bigger journal yet.

Can I also just say how much I adore the blank brown pages of my commonplace book?

It makes it feel like such a free and creative space for me to go wild. No constraints. No limitations.

This is what my index looks like currently. Pages 4, 5, and 6 are all from The Artist’s Way.

Notice also how my commonplace book looks, to put it bluntly, like shit. I did this on purpose.

I wanted to purposefully dive in without any sort of precision.

My sense of perfectionism is always holding my back, and I will let it take the reigns no longer.

I want the lines to look like shit, I want my writing to occasionally drift upwards instead of straight across.

Because those things drive me crazy. And the more I give up control, the more I’ll be desensitized to my sense of perfectionism.

It’s not revolutionary but it’s my own way of fighting the goblins in my brain.

So yes, that has been my current foray into the journaling world.

I intend to make a video about my own journaling ecosystem, and why you should journal/ prompts to start.

I’ll be sure to update you all when I do make them, so look forward to that! I just want to give myself some more time with this physical diary before I talk about it in length.

Thank you so much for listening to me, and for giving me another avenue in which to write out my feelings and thoughts, this time to share with the world.

I like this little space I’ve created. I hope you do too.

Please take care of yourself, especially in this heat a lot of us are experiencing, and maybe give journaling a try if it’s something you haven’t tried before or gave up long ago. You just might fall in love.

Love ya, take care. <3