While I may have written quite the beast of a series on journaling last year, I still feel like there’s more to write about in regards to this therapeutic practice. Particularly when it comes to three common excuses people tell me as to why they don’t journal. I don’t mean any of this cynically as journaling is a choice people are free to make, but for the people who say they want to do it, but “can’t,” ie. simply don’t do it, I want to help you get out of your own way and get down to business.

Journaling is not easy, as I’ve said before. It requires you to take a hard and honest look at yourself, and it demands your full attention to really reflect on the thoughts and feelings you have about the events in your life. Some journaling can be easy breezy like simply writing about what you’re grateful for, or keeping track of your progress on a project, but real and soul searching journaling requires cognitive and emotional commitment.

No wonder people resist this simple, yet difficult practice, right? Sounds frustrating and often times it can be. Plus it also feels crazy to be arguing with yourself on a piece of paper, but like as Anne Frank said, “paper is more patient than people.” The biggest gift you can give yourself and to the world is the ability to express your thoughts and your entire being in the most clear and concise way possible, and one of the best ways to achieving that efficiency is taking the time to journal about your thoughts and feelings.

Here are The Top 3 Excuses For Journaling:

1. “I always forget to journal for a long time and then it’s too late because I can’t even remember what happened a few months ago.”
2. “I don’t even know what to write and I just get bored because I write about what I ate that morning.”
3. “I want to, but I don’t have the time for it. I’m just soooo busy.”

To distill these excuses into mere concepts let’s rename them as:

1. Lacking Memory
2. Getting Bored
3. Not Making the Time

Lacking Memory

But to those of you who do have the wonderful privilege of having their mental faculties in tact, you really do need to give yourself more credit rather than claiming absolute memory loss. While the easiest way to journal is to write about your day to day life as it unfolds, there’s also nothing wrong with taking many months or even years away from journaling before you get back to it. Especially if the intention is to write about all the things you’ve experienced from your time away from journaling. Writing about your past is just as important as writing about your present and future.

I’ve had times in my life where I’ve been fortunate enough to not really struggle for a while, and I’ve used those opportunities to reflect on the times I have struggled so that I can learn and grow from them more than the initial experience may have offered at the time. This way I am better equipped to face future challenges or even present challenges if I happen to be struggling at the moment. Either way, my journaling isn’t always as day to day as I’d like for it to be, but I am definitely okay with spending months away from my journal before chronicling my life in epochs whenever I get back to it.

In fact, as of writing this blog post, it is July 2023 (and I am only now posting it in June 2024), but all the things I’m journaling about are from earlier this year. As early as January, I’m writing about how my life has been this year and while most of it is chronological, a lot of it also structured by theme and predicament. Some things happened concurrently with others, while other things happened in a somewhat linear fashion.

How could I possibly remember this? Well, I just sit down and concentrate, thinking about key moments where I felt something strongly or something left an impression on me, and then work from there.

You can too if you just took the time to sit down and think about your life.

That’s all there is to it.

If you think you can’t remember your life from not too long ago, then you’re not thinking or trying very hard. But I promise you, if you decide to simply sit down and crack that journal open, you will remember. Give it some thought. Give it some time. Give it some attention. As you begin to write and recall specific events in your life, you will be engaging your memory bank and everything will come back flooding toward you.

The next challenge is to be able to structure your thoughts and feelings surrounding these past events in a way that at least makes sense to you. Remember, your journal is almost always for your eyes and your eyes only. So who cares if you write in run on sentences or go all over the place chronologically with what you write about? As long as you’re making the connections yourself the best you can and engaging your capacity to remember, that’s all that matters.

If it makes sense to you, then good. If not, then slow down and try to take it one thought at a time.

Getting Bored

“I don’t know what to write so I just get bored.”

I had a friend tell me that she got bored of journaling and eventually stopped after a mere two or three days at it. She said she didn’t know what to write about and got bored, thinking it was silly that all she did was write about what she had for breakfast and all these other mundane day to day things she does throughout the day. And then I figured, yeah, no wonder you got bored, you wrote about boring things!

Try thinking of journaling as a way to dramatize your life like it’s a novel. Rarely ever do you see characters in a novel doing mundane tasks like brushing their teeth or mowing the lawn unless they’re thinking about something important, having an important dialogue with another character, or at the very least revealing the nuance of the character with how they do these day to day activities in a unique way.

Likewise, with yourself, you can even journal about getting frustrated while doing the dishes. Maybe a spec of dirt refused to get wiped off by your sponge. Who ate so poorly as to let these morsels get this dry? Why is this sponge so weak? Why hasn’t anyone in the damn house bought a new one yet? Stupid little questions and frustrations like this, silly and mundane as they may seem, can also lead to some revelations about yourself in regards to what actually sets you off and what you need to do around your home to improve it.

But obviously you will tire rather quickly if you dramatize dumb little things to this degree all the time. What you want to do is write about the big moments in your life, or even the small ones that lead up to them. For me personally, I had one hell of a time journaling about my brother’s wedding last year as I reflected what his marriage brought out in me and my conceptions of love and romance. Where he and his wife shared schmaltzy and heartfelt vows with each other and responded to each other so smoothly, I was involved in a relationship where I wanted to express that same kind of affection, but it was toward a woman who just wasn’t into that kind of communication. That totally gave me a wake up call, making me realize how much of an uphill battle I was fighting at the time.

Hell, even as of today’s journal entry, I wrote about the process it took for me to build my gaming and music production PC. To most people it’s not a big deal. It just a one and done occurrence, but for me it was a gauntlet of self doubt and triumph because it was my first time doing it. Then on top of that, once I somehow managed to build this PC to the point of getting it to run as it should, as opposed to having it explode upon turning it on for the first time, I also had to sell my old PC to my nephew to make space in my room and to make back some of the money I spent on the NEW PC’s parts.

To most people this will look and sound like a convenient sale within the family, but when you dig deeper as I have in my journal entry, I learned that it meant a lot to him to finally have a gaming PC because out of my other gamer cousins and I, my nephew would be the last of us and his friends to get a gaming PC to escape console poverty.

Even the tiniest thing like that can have significance in your life if you look hard enough, but otherwise, you can and always should bank up on some more significant things in your life like a break up or new relationship, a death in the family, or a conflict with a friend as something to journal about and get some revelations from.

Not Making the Time

“I want to journal, but I don’t have time to.”

Yes, you do. If you want to, you will make the time. Proclaiming how much you wanna do it is just blowing hot air and accomplishing nothing. Unless you work a demanding job where you’re on call 24/7, got a spouse and some kids to support, along with a whole lot of other responsibilities to tend to, you have the time to journal. Otherwise, you really need to take a hard look at your schedule and priorities as no one should be living that kind of a constricting life.

If journaling is something you really want to do, then I suggest you get the fuck off your phone, stop binging Netflix, and definitely turn off the evening news, and do something way more productive with your time and journal. You will have a much better time being in quiet conversation with yourself and tracking every thought and feeling as you put pen to paper, much quicker than you would wasting your time on the shit that most people consume on the daily basis.

You do this one thing and you’re already ahead of the curve because most people don’t even stop to think they should journal, let alone engage in any personal development. But ego stuff aside, it is just so much better to live the conscious and purposeful life rather than living life by default. It may feel easier and more comfortable, and living on purpose has its difficulties, but at the end of your life, I guarantee that you’ll wish you made the time for more important things like journaling rather than arguing with idiots online while you take a shit in the morning.