journal.

The beauty of journalling, of writing a lot, writing all the details of your life, is that it helps you drill down into awareness and presence. It lets everything, the everyday-ness of life, each thing, become valuable. Everything is worth taking note of.

I used to journal a lot when I was young. I don’t remember when I started, but I have a stack of old journals in a shoebox in the closet that date back 15 years. In some ways, I struggled with the same “I-must-write-I-can’t-write” tensions that I feel today. But I still wrote quite a bit, and I carefully documented feelings. I wasn’t the sort to record each thing that happened in a day, but I never failed to capture the emotions.

Those journals, all of them, are incredibly transportive for me. I can open any page and almost before reading the words, the feelings come back to me in a rush. I was always excellent at journalling in the midst of heartbreak and loneliness, so those are the themes of most journals. My most recent journal more or less ends three years ago, just after I met Jacob. I burst in for an entry or two each year, but really I stopped journalling the moment our relationship began.

There are reasons. Jacob is my biggest writing fan and believes in my ability more than I ever have. With his encouragement at my heels, I started writing and sharing my writing outside of a journal, something I had never done before I met him. And journalling, for me at least, has often been the way I hold loneliness at bay. I have always been a lonely person, even when I’m not alone. Somehow a journal is a witness to life when it feels like no one else is watching.

I cracked open that last journal earlier this week. It’s first page was written in the days before I graduated from college. It captures my move across the country, my struggles to find meaningful work, to make enough money to survive, it captures death, heartbreak, struggle to be the truest version of myself.

Opening those pages reminded me how powerful it is to be, for a moment, the person I was, whether that’s five years or five days ago. I want to have that same power to connect with the person I am now after time has carried me away. In short, I’ve been thinking about earnestly taking up journalling again.

This season of my life is good. There are challenges, to be sure, and struggles to be struggled through, but it is still overwhelmingly filled with freedom, beauty, love, hope, possibility, future. Those things never feel so pressing, needing to be documented, but they are, maybe more so than the struggles. Hope is the thing to come back to, the thing to find in the pages again and again.