The Death and Rebirth of Journaling

One of my senior pictures starring a stack of my journals, taken in 2009

From 1999 to 2010, I kept journals the traditional way: with pen and paper.  I have several dozen journals that range in many sizes and shapes and colors.  They are filled with memories, dreams, stories, and even drawings.  Whenever I experienced something amazing, I journaled.  Whenever I felt frustrated, I journaled.  Writing my thoughts and feelings down was a form of therapy for me, which is why I journaled nearly every day.  My journals are priceless treasures that I will always cherish and protect.  However, my anxiety disorder led to the death of journaling for me.

It sounds awfully sad, and it kind of is, but I promise that there is a happy ending to this post.  My anxiety disorder is centered around unhealthy thoughts, and journaling is all about writing thoughts down.  Therein lied the problem.  When I tried to journal out my feelings like I always had in the past, only the twisted, anxious thoughts came out.  As these twisted thoughts were translated into physical form, they gained more strength and greater validity.  They became more real than they were supposed to be.  Journaling was actually making my anxiety worse.  In order to break the choking grasp anxiety had on my mind, I had to stop journaling.  I had to stop soul searching and close my mind for a season.  I had to learn to live in the moment, recognize and appreciate the beauty in the world all around me that was real and tangible.  This helped lessen the power of my anxiety, and eventually I learned enough skills to keep it out of my mind for good.  The question then became: do I begin journaling again?

While I was still learning to deal with my anxiety, I started this little blog called "Anxiously Engaged."  I had tried and failed to keep a blog in the past, but for some reason, I stuck with this one.  I found it was easy to post something every week, and I had a ton of fun putting together my resource pages.  Today, I have developed a  love of blogging and plan to keep at it until who-knows-when.  Turns out, blogging has become my new form of journaling.  I can still write out my thoughts and feelings about all sorts of things, but because it's public, I'm refrained from delving too deep into anxious thoughts.  Maybe I will journal with paper and pen again one day, but until then, blogging is just as good.  Sometime soon, I want to print out all of my blog posts and put them in a binder.  In that way, it will be like my old journals after all.  

Image by st3to

"The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise, I might suffocate."   
      --Anne Frank, from The Diary of a Young Girl