Keeping a journal
Dec. 9th, 2004 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matilda36According to my father, most psychologists advise against the practice of keeping a journal, because re-reading compulsively the entries make the person live in the past and looking ahead to the future as they should do.
I started keeping a journal at high school, an extension from the keeping of a school diary. In the early years the two were the same. These were very dark days of my life, I was very lonely and talking to my diary was a coping practice. I carried keeping diaries more or less regularly, until the start of my nervous breakdown when my creativity disappeared.
Creating this live journal (and keeping it alive) was a massive turn point in my healing process. I was able to write, to communicate, to create again. I am not obsessed with keeping it, but I like to have it and to use it.
I rarely read back to my old entries, in this or my old paper diaries because even when, like now I use it to free myself from negative emotions by analysing them, once they become written words they are gone. I remember writing very long entries and they were always very dark at the beginning and much lighter at the end. It's a cathartic practice. Everything has it's use. Dr Broccoli is for raising the emotions, meditation is for analysing them, the journal is to exorcise them.
I do not live in the past by keeping a journal, I am putting it at rest.
Amen.
I started keeping a journal at high school, an extension from the keeping of a school diary. In the early years the two were the same. These were very dark days of my life, I was very lonely and talking to my diary was a coping practice. I carried keeping diaries more or less regularly, until the start of my nervous breakdown when my creativity disappeared.
Creating this live journal (and keeping it alive) was a massive turn point in my healing process. I was able to write, to communicate, to create again. I am not obsessed with keeping it, but I like to have it and to use it.
I rarely read back to my old entries, in this or my old paper diaries because even when, like now I use it to free myself from negative emotions by analysing them, once they become written words they are gone. I remember writing very long entries and they were always very dark at the beginning and much lighter at the end. It's a cathartic practice. Everything has it's use. Dr Broccoli is for raising the emotions, meditation is for analysing them, the journal is to exorcise them.
I do not live in the past by keeping a journal, I am putting it at rest.
Amen.
