Growing up, diary-keeping is something that always intrigued me. I was inspired whenever I watched movies with a narrator’s voiceover reading excerpts of their journal as scenes transitioned. I loved reading books in the Dear America juvenile historical fiction series. I read Anne Frank’s diary when I was 12, which made it all the more profound since she was not even a year older than me when she began her writings.
As a kid, I made several attempts to begin my own journaling habit. I even got a diary with a lock and key as a gift once.
But, I wasn’t very successful.
I’d start with the intention of writing regularly, only to…not. Months would go by and then I’d decide to start over. I’d rip out the pages already used and begin afresh. This would continue until there were only a few pages left in whatever notebook or journal I was using.
Then, on January 1, 2002—a month before I turned 13—I asked my mom if we had any unused notebooks. She found a red 1-subject wide-ruled spiral notebook and let me have it. I wrote my first entry in the notebook and, since then, I’ve regularly kept a diary.
I’m not sure why it stuck that time, but it did. From 2002 to 2014, I would begin a new notebook at the beginning of each new year and would write entries until the final page, manipulating the length of my December entries so that on the 31st, I’d reach the final page.
I’d also tape articles, ticket stubs, photos, cards, magazine clippings, playbills, and other mementos in the pages.
In 2015, I went digital and started using Word documents to write entries. At first, it felt impersonal compared to written words on a page, but the convenience and ease of typing was undeniable and has been my method ever since
Some year’s diaries are very thin. 2021’s diary has barely 20 pages. Some are bulging at the seams. 2004 took up a 3-subject and a 1-subject spiral notebook with my teenage ramblings and copious clippings of Johnny Depp’s face. 2017 required TWO binders to hold the printed document with all my diary entries of that particularly eventful and tumultuous year!
I’m sure many may hear that and wonder how self-involved and neurotic can I be to have thousands of pages full of me talking about myself and my own life. Marlene Dietrich accused diary-keepers of having an inflated sense of self-importance—despite the fact that she secretly kept a diary and, ironically, made this accusation in her memoir. While I can see how someone may think along those lines, it’s an unfair summation.
Whether you consider Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl or any of the multitude of journals from historical figures, diaries are an exclusive gateway into the minds and inner-workings of people who have influenced the world.
But, what about the vast majority of us who don’t become historically noteworthy?
Who wants to read the diary of an everyday Jane?
Posterity?
Maybe, but what about those of us who don’t or won’t have children?
What’s the point of keeping a diary if no one will read it one day?
Is it really just a symptom of overt self-involvement?
Seriously, what’s the point of keeping a diary at all?
That’s a question I frequently asked myself after two decades of diary-keeping.
What’s the point?
After all, I have no plans to be famous in any regard. It’s also unlikely I’ll have children. So, these stacks of spiral notebooks and binders and the electronic folder full diary documents…what’s going to happen to them when I’m gone?
Ironically, it took taking a nearly half-year hiatus from the practice before I got the answer to the question of why bother spending time and effort writing about myself and my life and keeping this ever-growing collection of notebooks and documents when nobody but me will ever read them.
Here’s the thing: that doesn’t matter.
Someone else reading them is not the point.
Keeping a diary or journal is not primarily for the benefit of posterity. While, yes, sure, it can be a benefit, that’s not the principal reason for the practice. The chief beneficiary is the writer.
Yes, you are the reason why you should be journaling.
I’d known for a while that journaling helped my mental health in many ways like organizing my thoughts, helping me keep the details of memories alive, and providing an outlet for getting out my true, honest, unfiltered feelings. But, the truth is, in my experience, the argument for journaling’s benefits goes even deeper than that.
Here are 5 reasons why journaling will benefit your over all life. Reason #5 is my recently-discovered profound ‘Why’ journaling is a beneficial practice and something I plan to stick to for life.
- You don’t know what you think until you can write it down.
Have you ever heard anyone say something along the lines of, “I knew I felt that way, but until I heard that person say it, I didn’t know how to express it?” Maybe you’ve said something similar at some point.
Until our ideas or feelings can be translated into communicative methods (that is, words), they remain abstract concepts inside of us. We know they’re there and we know generally what they’re about, but do we understand them and can we effectively express them?
The answer is no, not until they can be put into words.
The first time I heard this assertion was from a college professor during my junior year. He maintained that your ideas and opinions are a jumbled garble floating around in your brain and until you can organize them enough so as to put them on a page in a coherent manner, they would stay a muddled mess and you, yourself, would not completely understand them, despite being the possessor of those ideas and opinions.
So here we find the first benefit of journaling: it helps you make sense of your thoughts and feelings.
Expressing these things through writing forces your brain to sift through the abstract and form something concrete and expressible, which, thereby, makes it easier for you to get your mind around these things.
- Mind Games
My husband is in awe of my ability to remember stuff. Or, maybe ‘exasperation’ is a more appropriate word. More than once, he’s lamented his inability to win arguments because I remember every little thing.
In general, it seems women tend to have this trait in greater abundance than men. But, my ability to recall details about events in my life is much stronger than, say, remembering all I need to get at the grocery store if I leave my list at home or remembering to text a friend about pending weekend plans.
I believe this is due in large part to my journaling habit.
Writing an account of things that happen to you and how these things affect you causes your mind to review these occurrences and recall details. You relive your experiences and record elements and events as you remember them. Memory is notoriously fickle, so getting down your memories in a timely manner is important, which is why regular writing in your journal is important.
Remember to focus on the things that are important and that you want preserved, things you really want to be sure you remember. You may not be able to remember exactly what you wore that day or what the weather was like, but how you felt, things said to you, thoughts and impressions you had—those are the important details to record in a diary.
This is your account of things. And, I find, that in recording those things, other trivial details tend to stay with me.
Keeping a written record of your life’s events is like a workout for your memory muscle and, like other muscles, the more you use it, the stronger it will be and the more readily your brain will be able to recall dates, events, days, names, and, yes, that thing your partner said to you that time!
- It’s cheaper than life-long therapy
Therapy is a wonderful resource and I’m a staunch advocate for it. I’m unashamedly open about the fact that I went through therapy for three years and found it hugely helpful.
Different therapists have different methods, but most therapy involves some form of the therapist asking poignant, open-ended questions and the patient answering. Often, I found myself elaborating on my answer and, in so doing, finding the solution to whatever issue we were discussing and seemingly stumbling upon the enlightenment I was seeking.
Sometimes all it takes to have that “Aha!” moment is hearing ourselves say it—or, finding ourselves writing it.
A caveat here:
Like a good therapist, remember that the page doesn’t judge. You can and should be as irrational, petty, selfish, ungrateful, or nasty as you feel when writing in your diary. Just get it out, unapologetically!
Work on righting things and correcting your personal weak points later. Just like our bodies when infected with a virus must purge before they can mend, you need to get out that brain vomit before you can make sense of things and take action to successfully improve.
And if you’re worried about what posterity may think of you if they read those unflattering entries, don’t! Give yourself this one space to be unabashedly your honest self without worrying about the opinions of others.
If you need to do therapy with a licensed therapist, by all means do it! But, if you’re just needing a little insight or a way to express your inner-workings, journaling is also a wonderful resource and helpful practice, and one encouraged by many mental health professionals.
- Decisions, decisions!
Piggy-backing on the previous point, once you’re in the habit of expressing yourself on the page and being unapologetically honest with yourself about how you’re feeling, you’ll find that journaling is a great way to flesh out pros and cons of choices you face.
And, just as you may occasionally unintentionally solve your own problems by baring your soul to yourself on paper, you may realize that the best choice in whatever dilemma you’re facing is more apparent than you originally believed.
Moreover, while running through your reasoning and emptying your mind of all the plates it’s trying to keep midair, you may discover factors and aspects not yet considered.
Just as recording memories helps keep your memory muscle fit, so does problem solving by self-analysis. After doing this for an extended amount of time, you’ll start to see patterns, tendencies, and triggers in yourself and be able to recognize those traits as they resurface in the future.
And, finally but most importantly:
- You’ll be there for you
It was the spring of 2021 and I was tired of diary-keeping.
I’d gotten into the habit of allowing weeks, sometimes months to pass between entries. This meant when I did sit down to write, I felt like I had to backtrack to keep the record up-to-date and the recounting of all things since my previous entry would take so much time and effort, that I found myself being very vague and nondescript as I hastily ran through everything. And by the time I’d caught up, I was too tired to write about current events. This made the whole thing a chore.
So, I sat down to my computer, opened up my ‘2021’ document and wrote that I was quitting diary-keeping for this reason. Also, I was now in my 30’s and my life was pretty stable and non-descript. When I felt conflicted or down, I had a fiancé to hear me out and offer advice. So, I no longer felt the need to journal.
So, I quit—for a while. But, I restarted in September of that year, though I stated that going forward, I was not going to fill in any substantial gaps between my entries anymore. What made me restart?
September 2021 was an emotionally chaotic time. I was approaching my wedding day and, as anyone who’s been through getting married knows, a lot of feelings come up in those weeks leading up to the big day.
For me, there was a lot of introspection and taking stock. I found myself sitting down to my laptop and perusing my archive of diary documents.
It’s the closest I’ll probably ever get to a time machine.
I walked through the last six or so years of my life, which, was quite a journey. I realized how far I’ve come in so many ways. The insight I gained from my past self and what seemed like frivolous ramblings at the time of their writing was astounding.
It put so much in perspective, reminded me of lessons learned, and, more than anything, reminded me that things will turn out okay. Because everything I was bemoaning and stressing over in the entries I revisited turned out okay—maybe not the way I wanted or expected. But, it was all okay in the end.
I think that is a reminder we can’t get often enough.
No one knows us better than ourselves and, while we frequently need outside advice and the perspective of others, insight from our past self is a powerful tool.
When I find myself in a predicament and unsure of how to navigate, I’ll remember a similar time of my past (again, relying on that fit memory muscle) and consult my diary of the time. Even if I don’t find any gems of wisdom or major revelations, just the reminder that those situations turned out okay helps assure me that whatever I’m facing now will eventually turn out alright as well.
Whenever I return to my old entries, I’ll also send some good vibes out through the ether to myself at the era of my past writing, wherever in time and space she is, letting her know she’ll come out fine. I take comfort in thinking my future self does the same for me now and that I may be helping her whenever I write entries now.
Even if you don’t have my hippie soul and leave out mystical elements from your journaling practice, it will still be nonetheless valuable.
It’s so worth it.
Journaling takes time. It takes effort. And, to do it regularly, it has to become a conscious habit. But, a journaling practice is something I hope you’ll at least give it a try for the practical benefits. The insight, self-discovery, and memory aid you stand to gain is invaluable.
I have thousands of pages of writings spanning the last two decades to back me up on that.