I’ve been journalling for a long time, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes I write my Morning Pages purely for the ritual of doing so, knowing that there will undoubtedly come a time when I will need them again. Life is not all sweetness and light, though, in my honest moments I realise that for me, right now, it would be if I let it.
I came to journalling, in the sense of taking it seriously, in 2017. The timing was divine. A year later I would desperately need it. As I have said before, and will presumably say again, journalling may not have saved my life, but it saved my sanity. Many times.
Even before I knew I was journalling, I was. It was basically journalling when I was simply writing the gratitude lists that got me through my first serious depression back in 2005. Thank you, Susan Jeffers. It was, when I made sense of my walking escapes from the world of work by writing travel diaries. Thank you, travel writers everywhere. Before there was e-mail, I wrote long letters to friends, teenage romantic interludists, maiden aunts. When the technology came along, I continued that tradition with too many late-night e-mails to the wrong people. A lot of the time, I didn’t know I was really writing to myself. Apologies to everyone who was on the receiving end of what should have been in a notebook and labelled “Note to Self” – and also thank you for putting up with it and
either forgiving me for it or high-tailing it out of my life. In the end, both approaches worked for me.
It struck me as strange then, when I found that journalling did not seem to be serving me so well as I know it can. The ritual aspect of Morning Pages still works for me, as ritual, but during the Spring I began to recognise that the content of it, what I was actually putting on the page, the way I was approaching the page, was less than helpful. I tried to shift into more deliberate prompted reflections, but for some reason couldn’t make it work. Perhaps I had become too entrenched in the splurge habit of the original incarnation of Morning Pages. Perhaps I needed the blanket to be shaken.
Rather than the journal being the passive recipient of my shallow wallowing – there had been a lot of that of late – I realised I wanted it to be the active recalibration of what needs to re-set and the joyful celebration of what really doesn’t.
Walking to the shops, in the rain, remembering to stand a little straighter, I realised – or remembered – that what I most want on my darker days is simply to feel lighter, brighter. I noted how much I was cheered by that patch of ox-eye daisies that the cemetery mowers had diligently steered around. I was pleased that I had abandoned my original plan for the day in a way that meant (a) I would get less wet and (b) would have time to finish reading the current book before bedtime. I even smiled at the fact that the orange tree I thought I had ordered was labelled ‘lemon’ when it arrived. It doesn’t matter enough to dispute or return; I’ll try to keep it alive.
These small thoughts made me feel more of the lightness. They reinforced my underlying philosophy – the one I lose sight of when I succumb to sadness or melancholy – that we can change our minds – and, in fact, that we must.
Jackee and Fiona1 keep reminding me that journalling is a skills-based practice, but while they can help me learn the skills, the one thing they cannot do is to tell me what my journal is actually for. What I want it to do for me entirely determines which skills I need to deploy, and that is something each of us has to work out for ourselves.
Because I came to the practice in a time of need, and deepened it in a time of grief and dislocation and overwhelm, the Morning Pages skill of just brain-dumping, clearance, decluttering, whatever term sits best, was cathartic. The requirement of three pages – even though I cheat and use A5 notebooks – often left me having to write affirmations just to fill up the space.
Here’s a thing: some of what I affirmed – especially around my writing ambitions – are now factually
true. Believe in magic and it works.
The downside was, surprisingly, when life improved. I still have dark days – who doesn’t? – but on the whole the sign in my hallway which reminds me that "My ideal life is now my reality" is true. The slogan sits there under a self-taken photograph of a February sunset in Brighton just to remind me. Lest I forget. My life is not just good, it is amazing. I am not bragging. I am lucky and I am grateful.
Not least because ideal is not the same as perfect. Ideal leaves room for growth, for change, for revision and rethinking. There are always gaps between what we want and what we have. Life is like the crazy-paving pathway to my front door…it’s made up of random bits of stone that don’t meet at the edges, and the weeds will always find their way to the surface. My ideal life includes learning to accept that. My ideal life includes finding the lessons in front of me, and then trying to learn them.
Sometimes I think my ideal would delete the 'having to learn' part of it, but on my better days I know it wouldn't...on my better days I know what a 'kick' I get out of having learned something that didn't come too easily.
A thing I didn’t realise: heartache can become a habit. If you wake up in a bad mood – yep, me too, some days – then the page invites you to rationalise it. It’s a well-meaning therapist calmly inviting tell me about it. Sometimes a good thing. Often though, especially when life is good, you don’t need a therapist, you need an equally well-meaning friend to plant her size sixes firmly in the small of your back and tell you to stop being such a wuss.
I had become so accustomed to my journal being my therapist; I wasn’t sure how to tell her that now (right now, maybe not forever, but right now) I don’t need therapy.
On the last page of my previous-to-this-one journal I somehow alighted on six touchstones. These are values that have guided my life for the last few years in their various garments. On this particular day they showed up as:-
Energy - Flow - Abundance
Beauty - Wisdom - Love
I wrote down that I want to notice the degree to which they show up in my life and the ways in which I can create or enhance them. So then, later, I add another stone: Creativity.
With no idea of whether I’m capable of it, I set out to make friends with my journalling practice, to tease it into a more proactive, gently pushing thing. Still there for when I genuinely need to weep, but well away from the muddy puddle it has become of late. In other words, I decide to see if I can take my own advice and focus on the good stuff.
I make myself a kitchen-wall poster to remind me, and I go into the next journal with these thoughts in mind. I no longer - or more accurately at this point in time I don't - feel the need to brain-dump first thing in the morning. I feel the need to ask more interesting questions: what do I want to find today, who do I want to be today, who might I meet today, what would I really love to learn today?
Breaking the MP habit isn't easy though. I do backslide. That's the point of the kitchen poster...I see it every time I walk in there...Remember what you said? it whispers to me.
I'm still a fan of the ritual practice of going to the page first thing in the morning. To miss a day of that after nearly ten years will hit me hard when it comes, but the point of clarifying my touchstones is to understand why I'm doing it, what I need it to do for me, and that totally influences how I do it.
My good friend repeatedly reminds me that everything changes, all the time, and it helps if we notice when the changes are nudging us to change our own approaches to things, here and there.
1 Jackee Holder & Fiona Parashar – The School of Journalling, and joyful hosts of our women’s early Tuesday morning zooms. HOME | School of Journaling
