My journaling experience
An honest story of how a notebook helped me to overcome the problems in my life.
In my younger years, my life was mostly happy. I hardly had to force myself to do something I didn’t like. Although sometimes I did realise and reflect about the lessons which a specific event had taught me, they were simple in nature. I was never reflective, and never thought about cataloguing my experience in life.
Then for a span of three months this year, a crisis struck me. For my co-curricular activity (CCA), my workload suddenly increased. I was unable to keep up and furthermore, it was during a period of soured relationships with my CCA-mates, which exacerbated a feeling of loneliness and burnout. During this time, I developed a crush on my tablemate, which gave me a sense of satisfaction in life. However, I was purposeless without her by my side. Life felt like a roller coaster. I was riding high on dopamine in school beside her, but when I returned from school suddenly there was hardly anything worth living for. I tried everything to distract myself from confronting this nihilism, and eventually settled on bingeing Youtube videos. I knew that I could not depend solely on the listening ear of my friends to cope, but still I developed the habit of ranting my insecurities. I wanted life to be as simple as it was before, and in pursuing that hopeless fantasy my motivation to do work dropped.
At the end of the third month, I went on a trip to Turkiye and Greece. Although my worries were still prominent in my mind, the trip was a much needed break for me.
In the city of Thessaloniki, I stumbled upon a beachside seller selling magnets of pop-culture icons. However, what drew me to the store was actually a wooden-covered notebook with a still from the movie Joker as its cover picture. While I had not watched the movie, I was drawn to the design of that notebook.
When the seller saw me interested, he opened the notebook, showing four ropes binding four exercise books. It was a refillable notebook cover. Call me dumb, I had never seen a refillable notebook cover up till then. I bought the notebook.
I had brought an exercise book on the trip for me to record my feelings and write prose if I wanted to. I bound it into my new notebook cover (henceforth referred to as ‘my notebook’). I had heard of journaling as a good way to relieve stress, but had not gotten around to trying it. Now, with a completely new notebook, I reckoned it was the perfect time to start before the motivation ran out.
At the start, what I did was not journaling. Instead, everything I could think of, I wrote into my notebook. While writing what you’re reading right now, I went to re-read the contents of that first exercise book, and I found a treasure trove. There was poetry, lists of what I had to do, quotes, and even prose based on real life events (including my first ever drafted and edited short story — entirely within that book) that I had written during the trip. I had even written their dates of conception — it was a creative diary for me back then.
Initially, it started off well. However, the more I ‘journaled’ in that notebook, the more muddled I realised my mind was going. The more I wrote, the more that notebook felt like a place for me to create. It did not help me cope with the issues that I desperately needed help with.
What I needed was a place to stare myself down, dismantle my thought paradigms, discard the useless parts, and pick myself up when the process had ended. A creative diary could not do such a thing.
So I changed my exercise book (thankfully there were only a few pages left for the old one) into a completely untouched one. To differentiate the experience writing in this exercise book from the previous one, I made sure to use only black ink instead of both blue and black. I was good to go.
My method was, if I had some epiphany about life or a sudden outburst of intense feeling, I would document it down in my journal. So for example if during class I suddenly thought about how education wasn’t about the understanding and regurgitating of facts itself but for a higher purpose — grasping soft skills that would serve us well in the future, I would instantly write it down. Then if I had another epiphany while writing, I would write that down as well. If I was too stressed out over deadlines, I would write it out in my exercise book, being completely frank, just to get the stress out of me.
I was a chronic dreamer, where even minute thoughts would fester and gnaw at me. Before trying out journaling, I had no place to let my feelings out, so I would let them stay hold inside me, ravaging me till my performance was detrimentally affected. However, the journal allowed me to get them out and look at them with an open mind.
Furthermore, it also allowed me to decrease my need to rant to my friends. With the book as a place for me to write, I was absolved of the need for another listening ear to hear my insecurities. Slowly and surely I was able to stop relying on my friends to sympathise with me, and eventually, I kept the number of times I had to rant low. I had definitely become emotionally stronger.
My problems eventually subsided. I built lasting relationships with my CCA mates and stopped liking my table partner. While time did dilute both issues, my notebook had played the main role in helping me cope on the day to day basis.
I learnt to live life to its fullest. I lived in the moment and enjoyed it, having given up trying to find the lost horizon. I grew more confident in myself and was able to joke around with my friends. Although occasionally I still slipped up, I did not berate myself that much. When my destructive thoughts appeared, they would be exorcised in the pages of my notebook.
In retrospect, I had made the right call at that beachside stall in Greece.
