On Journaling

Can Bullet Journaling Save You? This was the title of an article published last fall in the New Yorker with the presumptuous and self-important appendage “save this for later”. Journaling, not unlike a collection of wool sweaters and a compulsion to offer food to friends, would for me be considered characteristic. However, it is something which until recently, I have largely avoided.

My first journal was given to me by my grandmother and it was less a journal than it was a spiral-bound notebook from CVS with my name inscribed in black sharpie on the cover. In the kitchen of her house in Cape Cod, my journal sat in between a basket of blue ballpoint pens and an always full box of tissues. In the mornings, while my grandmother made us breakfast, I would sit on the porch opposite my grandfather while he read the paper, and I would scribble in this notebook thoughts about the present or the future. (Never as children do we harp on the past because relative to the almost indefinite expanse of the future, it seems meek and unimportant, as if everything important is yet to come. This ends up working against us when we grow up only to realize that it is that past that shapes so much of our future, but I couldn’t have known this at age six). Thoughts of the present looked less like a pensive reflection and more a recitation of the moment’s goings-on. “I am sitting across from my grandfather while he reads. I am writing.” Hemingway-esque brevity but lacking in inspiration.

Notebooks were eventually replaced by diaries, the pink leather-bound books complete with a lock and key that I would hide from my parents more out of theatrics than necessity. What we are taught when we are gifted our first diary—probably at some Christmas yankee swap orchestrated by the parent leaders of our Girl Scouts of America troop—is that there are some thoughts whose burden must only be borne by the pages of an empty book. What these thoughts are and how they are articulated is privy to a confidence that can only be established between a person and an inanimate object, like gossip once shared over tea with our stuffed animals. The things that I would write in my diary were not the same things that I would whisper hastily into the ear of my friend on the bus to school. But I didn’t find catharsis nor exhilaration in the quiet rendering of my innermost thoughts. In hindsight, this was a reflection of two grave misunderstandings. The first thing that I misunderstood about journaling was that having a voice does not come exclusively from being heard. The second, was that the type of thoughts intended for a diary are not to be kept secret because they are somehow shameful—because ultimately the difference between having thoughts and having secrets is shame, we are taught—but because they are powerful, because they represent a unique sensitivity that helps us navigate the world. Shame was largely a reason that I avoided diaries and journals for years. In addition to the shame attached to the things one writes in a journal, there is also a guilt attached to not recording these things with some regularity, and the intersection of that guilt can almost be too much to bear. So I avoided the guilt attached to journaling by not journaling at all.

I did, however, end up saving that aforementioned article for later, aspirationally bookmarked among a sea of other New Yorker articles I might one day return to. When I began my journal in January of this year, I did return to the article in search of something, if not inspiration then maybe just sheer motivation. I was going abroad for the spring and I wanted to somehow keep a record of my experiences. I was also guided by some hope that journaling is in times of change what chocolate is in times of heartache, a crutch. Bullet journaling, the general category under which my journal falls, offered a unique alternative to the traditional journaling I had long avoided. “The real appeal of [bullet journaling] lies in the illusion of control it offers; anyone might be saved.” From what we need saving I suppose is up to the discretion of the journaler. Guilt is one thing from which bullet journaling saves us. With my own journal, my original intention was less to record my thoughts and more to document the weeks’ goings-on in a way similar to that of the entries in my first journal from childhood. In this way, my bullet journal also seemed to save me from the constraints of time that I had been using as an excuse not to journal. According to a series of inspirational posts I collected on Pinterest, I would outline my weeks on Sunday and make notes, either at each day’s beginning or end about the things I had hoped to or had achieved. Where journals can often read like novels, bullet journaling is more like a choose your own adventure tale. Ridding myself of the expectation that each entry would look or sounds a certain way, I increasingly felt compelled to expand upon the fragments of my life in stream-of-consciousness-like entries. Although, when unmoved by this desire, I stuck to the list-like entries and brief anecdotes upon which my journal was originally founded. I also filled the pages with bad art, meant for my eyes only, and the cards of restaurants or cafes I visited during my time abroad. In this way, my journal became not the rendering of my guilt, but the inconsistent and often incoherent mapping of a once current mood. And now it serves as a reminder of some of the year’s best moments, and a means by which to navigate some of its hardest. Below is some inspiration if you, too, feel so compelled to begin a journal or a bullet journal, now or at any point.

products you’ll want to begin