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What I’ve Learned from Three Years of Journaling
And tips to get you started on keeping a journal too
My fascination with journaling started at a very young age. I’m pretty sure it was after I read “Harriet the Spy” and became obsessed with the idea of recording everything in notebooks. A diary with a little lock on it that I found at the Scholastic Book Fair that same year would have certainly helped get me started but it was pink, and diary-keeping seemed like something only girls did in books or on TV shows.
Then, I saw the 1988 movie Biloxi Blues in which Matthew Broderick’s character keeps a diary. His diary gets taken by his fellow soldiers at boot camp, and they read aloud what he wrote about them! That seemed horrible! And it was another reason for me not to start keeping a diary!
Instead, I filled black and white Mead notebooks with short stories thanks to my grade school that encouraged creative writing every day. Now, I look back and realize that younger me really didn’t have much life experience worth writing about, but unfortunately, I never felt like it got much better.
Over the years, I still started and stopped a diary anyway more times than I can count. But days, weeks, and months would pass without me writing in it. I couldn’t think of anything to write, or when I did sit down to…