I Had Been Journaling Wrong for Over a Decade

It only took seventeen years, but you live and you learn.

Photo Credit: @sidecharx

“Grandpa died. I don’t know what to do.”

This is the earliest journal entry I can clearly remember. I was still a newbie to journaling at the time, but even a 10-year-old me knew that journaling was what I did when times got hard.

Ever since then, I tried to journal consistently about the good and the bad, but consistency has never been a strength of mine. Somehow, writing when times were good just felt like work, and it made journaling feel like a burden. However, writing when times were bad wasn’t much different— it relieved the burden…until years down the road when I dig up an old journal and am reminded of all the pain contained within the pages.

Recently, I found myself reaching for my journal more and more because even though things in my life seem to be changing for the better, something still felt off. However, I found that even after journaling, I still felt weighed down by whatever was troubling me. I stared at my journal and suddenly felt a rush of betrayal. Weren’t you supposed to relieve me of my burdens? Weren’t you supposed to give me clarity? Weren’t you supposed to help me accept my circumstances?

I felt frustrated. I felt angry. But more than anything, I felt helpless. Writing has always been my first and last resort in helping me keep my mental health in check, so what do I do when it just doesn’t work?

Maybe I was just journaling wrong. So, I tried digital journaling, bullet journaling, future journaling, journaling in the morning, journaling at night. I tried journaling in English, in Chinese, in Japanese. I tried journaling in drawings, in photos, in memes. I watched videos, read articles, and devoured everything under the #journalingtips tag, but I still found that something wasn’t working for me.

I got to a point where just looking at my journals made my chest tighten and my breath shallow. I wanted to pile them up and set them on fire and scream at my painful memories: “LET ME GO! STOP HAUNTING ME!”

It was then that I realized, they were just journals, just pages with years and years of dried ink on them. They can’t let me go. I have to let them go.

And, so, I did.

As I opened up my journals and reread the memories they held, I ripped out their pages one by one, and I threw them into the recycling bin. At first, I sat down and treated this as a nightly ritual, and reread my journal entries like I was going to be tested on them the next day. However, it wasn’t long before I quickly realized that my memories weren’t just painful, they were painfully boring.

Like, was I really that dramatic over a boy who’s name I can’t even remember now? Was I really that pitiful in wallowing in my own family issues when other people were going through so much worse? Was I really that self-absorbed that I wrote about the same event in three separate entries months apart from each other?

It got to the point where setting aside time to reread and discard those entries felt like a waste of time, so I moved my old journals next to the toilet and only allowed myself to relive those shitty times while taking a shit because at this point, I realized that those negative memories mean shit to me.

It took me about a week, but I finally finished tearing out and throwing out my last journal entry. The lightness I feel knowing that I will never read about those dark times again is something no amount of journaling has made me feel before, and I knew that, for me, journaling wasn’t just about getting down my anxious thoughts, but it’s about getting them down and letting them go.

Now, when I journal, I keep only the ones that make me happy, and the other ones? I write them down, I tear out the pages, and I smile as I watch them drop into the recycling bin.

You don’t get to decided whether or not I’m happy, I tell them.

I do.