Journaling

I kept an extremely updated journal when I was younger. A freakishly updated journal, actually. Nearly every day I would document pretty much everything that had happened to me. If I went a few weeks without writing, I would make a point-form list of all major events in my life.

I look back and I read those journals sometimes. Then I laugh because I'm so lazy that I would never be able to keep that up now. (I also wonder why I did that to begin with because wow was my life ever boring. Still is, to be honest. And yet, you still read my blog. I'm touched.)

I still keep a journal. Needless to say, my journaling process has undergone a massive...renovation.

As time went on (and I got more and more lazy), I stopped recording every single detail about my day, and started limiting myself to the bigger, more relevant events. (Also to-do lists. Lots and lots of unfinished to-do lists.) Now, I barely ever write anything about my life. I normally only write about life events if I really have something to rant about. (I think my life is sufficiently recorded on the interwebs, anyway.)

Now, I mostly use my journal for lists. To-do lists, book lists, resolution and goal lists, even the occasional shopping list. Sometimes I write portions of my stories in my journal if I'm away from the computer. Normally they're filled with ideas that I scrawl down at 2 AM, when my mind is racing from the adrenaline of a new story and I'm unable to sleep. My journals now fill up much more slowly, but I feel like they have much, much more important things stored within them.

Even though these pages no longer store the most detailed events of my life, they store the smaller, seemingly less important things that mean so much more. Out of context, they are nothing but lists and fictional places that mean nothing to anyone else but me.

But they are me. Hidden among the grocery lists and things I intended to do but never got around to, between the lines of every world I write about while everyone else is asleep, is me. My life, my feelings, my hopes and dreams and fears.

My journal can say the most about me, without truly saying a single word.


Until later,

- Justyne