I Fell In, Out and In Love Again With Journaling

I am recently writing in my brand new yellow Peanuts-branded Moleskine journal, and I have been giving my weird relationship with writing some thought.

I started writing in my journal when I was around 19 years old, and I discovered writing a journal accidentally when I realized that people around me had more interesting things to do than listen to me talk about the same thing again and again.

Which, in their defence, I clearly see now.

Journaling became the solace for the cacophony of thoughts in my brain that were going on repeat. The more I wrote, the more untangled they became.

Nevertheless, I am glad that I did not pick up writing thinking that it would benefit me (its benefits are not that immediate, and it would not have motivated me to pick up the habit) but more so out of the desperation to say something and to have a neutral ground for my thoughts and feelings to land on.

Nevertheless, I stuck to that habit of only writing in blank (which Alex claims is psychotic), black, and Moleskine-branded journals for the next few years of my life.

(My mom still has my old journal in her bed box that she does not let me read)

You know that intense feeling of loving something before you are going to give up on it? Yeah, that happened to me with journaling.

I realized that journaling had become more of a rumination activity, which increased during the COVID times. I realized that instead of processing my thoughts, I was replaying them like a fever dream, and the worst part of journaling in the morning in this depth of rumination was that I started my day visiting the past.

I became a slave to my thoughts until someone told me that I really didn't have to journal and I could take a break. They meant it well, and I, wanting an escape, followed the advice.

After the break, getting back to journaling has been the hardest thing to do, especially when I accidentally replaced my habit of journaling with scrolling through my phone in the morning because the dopamine levels really cannot compete. Can they?

Falling out of sync with good habits and picking up bad habits as a replacement is as easy as the ocean breeze. I really don't know why that happens and if there is a way around it, but it happened to me and I felt paralyzed by it.

However, for me, I do not judge myself anymore and try to fall in love with journaling again by writing as much as I want to on any given day. Sometimes there are 2 pages, and other times there are 2 lines. I haven't really cracked the code to not letting bad habits creep up on me all the time.

But that is something I learned about life, that love is not constant and consistency is the rarest quality for a human to bear.

It is one thing to know that and another to experience it.