Why journaling should be a new hobby of yours
In the age of endless distractions, it’s very easy to throw our feelings aside and just stare into a screen full of funny videos and pictures. Everything today is so clickable, watchable and shareable that we tend to forget about the show that’s going on in our own head. We get so caught up in who has married who, who’s new album has come out, and how many likes we get that one a picture that we lose ourselves in the collective. It’s becoming more and more seldom to see a notebook being put to use just as much as a laptop is. It’s so important to stop and evaluate issues and situations, which is often best done by hashing it out with paper and pen.
It seems difficult, especially in a world where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, to find the time to pull out a notebook and write. I would even go as far as saying that it first feels downright awkward to do. When I first began journaling, my roommates would just look at me and ask what I was doing, as I was the only one not watching TV or on their phone. But, we all acclimated to my new hobby, and I reaped the benefits nearly immediately. There’s something so special about physically writing out thoughts and feelings. Every stroke of the pen is intentional, as there is no spell check or suggestive typing. Sure, it is still helpful to write down notes in one’s phone, but it’s best to leave your phone out of your emotions.
When we begin writing, we’re often not quite sure what we even want to say; why we’re even writing. But miraculously — whether there is premeditation in the prose or not — the words find their way across the lines. That is, of course, if your notebook has lines across the pages. It’s often so hard to verbalize emotions into comprehensible sentences or phrases. The wording can be so close to fruition yet be just out of reach; just feeling our fingertips graze the bottoms of the mentally blurred out words. Journaling often helps remove the shroud that we drape over our feelings, and find the words to describe them.
Even if there are no issues to write about, it helps just to write down what happens during a typical day, something funny that happened, or just personal goals. Whatever is written on the page is immaterial compared to the documentation of your own life. There is nothing quite as phenomenal as observing growth, especially when it’s our own. To look upon episodic documentation of your own emotional growth is something that is comparable to few. To leave you to bask in the words of the wiser; “And your very flesh shall be a great poem” by Walt Whitman.
