Journalling: Paper vs Digital

I’m having what feels like a sizable internal conflict at the moment. I was an avid journaller for most of my childhood and intermittently as a teenager. It is however one of the habits that I found myself picking back up during lockdown — along with novels and video games, regression, it’s a truly beautiful thing. It’s brought me a lot of peace over these last few years, making sense of those strange times, wading through paragraphs and gaining a sense of self-understanding, self-compassion even more so, that I very much needed. So the journalling is here to stay.

My conflict however, is how to journal. After getting a new laptop, hoping to move in to a freelance career over the next few years, oh and throw in moving country soon too, I was looking at how to streamline my life digitally. Become as efficient as I can be, standardise my systems and processes.

Naturally I started to think about how I journal. I had One Day on my last laptop, but only used it on a very ad-hoc basis. I have notebooks upon notebooks with thousands of words, experiences, breakdowns and everything else in between featuring. There is something I find really tangible about having these filled up books. They’re a tangible thing and I can see my life almost ‘stack up’. I can look at the notebooks and I know what phase of life I was in, occasionally they’ll have the remnants of a whiff of an old…