When I was eleven, I set a goal to write in my journal daily for three months. It took several months to accomplish it, but once I did, I didn’t stop writing daily till shortly after I turned 21, which was actually a very bad time in my life to stop. I wish I had more recorded from that time. Since then it has been kind of hit or miss when I write. Lately I have liked writing weekly on Sunday. Today while I was doing it, I thought back to how I have changed, both my person and my writing, simply through writing down my thoughts and actions with some type of regularity.

When I first started, I would mainly list what I did each day. I also knew that a paragraph is everything that is about one idea, and since everything I wrote each day was about what I did that day, I included it all in one paragraph, even if that paragraph extended over more than one page. I did not think I needed to break up each individual thing from that day into its own paragraph. My writing skills have improved as I’ve regularly used them, and now I would go back and tell myself a bit more about paragraphs.

My journal entries now rarely include a shopping list type description of what I have done. Rather, I write about themes, feelings, thoughts, troubles and their solutions. I think not writing every day lets me notice patterns more in my life and then I can write about the whole pattern, I can write about the larger picture because I can see it better rather than being stuck in the middle of it still and writing only about disconnected parts. Of course if I let too much time go between entries, I lose a lot of those patterns as well. Weekly seems to work right now.

And I’ve noticed that waiting until I’m on the end of a trial helps me to better see the purpose of it, and what I record from my trials now is more of a positive experience and what I gained from it rather than the doom and despair you can feel in the midst of a trial. I write my journal now for my own benefit so that I do not forget the lessons I have learned. But I also want others to read it to not think that my life was full of misery. I want them to see that I did enjoy my life, and while there are parts that might not be full of joy, I have taken something from those parts and added them to me.

Another thing about my journals is that I take a lot of time picking out the book I will be writing in, and I am very particular about the pens I use as well. For probably nine years now I have used books that do not have lines in them. I do not want to be confined in my writing by pre-determined lines. I want my mood to be able to indicate how big or little my writing is. I want to be able to add little things here and there to make my writing more interesting. I want the look of my journal, not just what is written in it, to reflect me and who I am when I write. My journal is me, on paper, and that’s a big responsibility for that book. At least I like to think so.