Growing up as a child to a school principal father, I was blessedly inundated with complementary books and journals every year at home given to him by publishing agents. There were diaries and journals of all kinds and sizes, that sometimes my dad had to gift them away as there were simply not enough space to house them. I would use several of them to draw or sketch on, capture academic notes on and the other ones to record down my daily interesting events and experience. I never really did journal consistently but I absolutely loved noting down special, weird or crazy little moments from time to time, especially during my teenage years, for fond reminiscence. And yet, whatever that I have written down during those years encapsulated most of my quirky emotional highs and lows as a young adult.
When I eventually left home to pursue higher education, I slowly abandoned the tendency to journal as University schedules started to pick up and becoming more intense over the semesters. Although most of them, if not all, have been decimated as a result of my parents' large-scale empty-nesters spring cleaning activity, I remembered the times when I thumbed through the penned pages at home during semester breaks that they never failed to bring smiles and light up my days reflecting on my silliness and immaturity of a certain extent in those days. Whether it was about highlights at school, friendship breaks and mends, sibling fights, parental controls, or secret crushes, many of which I could not recall vividly, they were all there as one great chapter and an evolutionary part of my life.
In the more recent years, except for a few mandatory submissions of coaching reflection papers, I have mostly resorted to meditating than journaling. I would spend more time observing my thoughts as they come and go, instead of disciplining myself to write and process them in writing. I could not get myself to write pages and pages of raw emotions and feelings no matter how beautiful and inviting the journals I bought were. Until one day, I was watching a video by Lisa Nichols asking its audience to think about an eulogy at a funeral three days from then and how the deceased would like to be remembered - only that the eulogy was ideally of our own. That was the moment when I picked up my pen again to write and rekindled my love of journaling. Perhaps it was incidental after all, but I could not stop writing that evening. I kept asking myself:
What do I want to be remembered for?
What's my legacy in this lifetime?
Will my son be proud of me?
Have I done enough?
How far still do I aim to go?
Have I made the best of everything that I have been gifted?
There was something about writing and seeing the words came purging on paper that made it so enthralling and healing. The question about having to make time for it in the first place has disappeared. It felt more like a 'must' than a 'could have'. When I finally was done with that, I felt relieved, slightly different as though something heavy has been lifted off me. In that instance, I realized a few things about journaling and how it has served me well all this time:
Deep intimate conversations with oneself
It reminds me even on days when noone seems to care and lend a ear, I am my own pillar of support and best listener. Writing down my flowing thoughts help me to process my inner world and chatters in an openly responsible way, and identify the different themes going through my headspace given specific circumstances. I could see the words that I used and witnessed once in a while how I have been so hard on myself, and other times so full of myself! There can be moments of imagination, praise, shock, anger, angst, misery, sacarsm and laughters nestled within all the word mass and released in such writing mess. It is a pretty cathartic way to honor and appreciate more both my strengths and weaknesses and most importantly, to understand better of the person that I am.
Show compassion towards oneself
Journaling allows me to capture various flavours of elations and tribulations of my life. Since neither can exist without the other (i.e. no highs without the lows, no light without the dark), it is an effective way to demonstrate compassion to myself by recognizing and appreciating the ups and downs of my journey through life, looking back and see how far I have come despite all the circumstances. Overcoming challenges is the part and parcel of life, isn't it? Sometimes it is too easy to discount the day-to-day occurences as trivial and insignificant, yet when I start connecting the dots going backwards, the emotions involved and the meaning assigned to each of those experience have influencing roles in shaping all kinds of decisions along the way. They also beckon for deeper awareness and engagement as I chart my path forward every day.
Continuous learning and non-linear personal growth
Every form of experience culminates to a moment of learning and growth. When things are great and going smoothly, I would ask myself: 'What can I feel grateful of from this experience?'. Similarly, when things pan out differently than expected, I would ask myself: 'What can I learn from this?'. The process of journaling provides me ample opportunities to emphasize the good but also vulnerable space to call out on various aspects for improvement. It is bizarre and perplexing yet humbling to occasionally see how I manage to screw things up again just as I thought to have it all together the last time! Journaling has been a great way to befriend the disempowering emotions through the delicate process of deconstruction or peeling the layers to understand the growth one needs to go through and embrace the becoming of oneself that is pure love and whole.
What about you - what do you love most about journaling? :)
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