Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

The word for the day is journal.

No, this isn’t one of those words that you have to learn to pass some standardized test. If you play any kind of adventure style games, you’re probably familiar with the term and its many uses already, but bear with me for a moment.

The humble journal is a gold mine, not only for historians and gamers, but for everyday people as well. It’s the cheapest form of therapy you’ll ever find, and the only known side effect of daily use is writer’s cramp. If you seriously OD on your journaling over a long period of time, I suppose carpal tunnel is a threat, but not likely.

Words have power. We know this instinctively, know that choosing the right word at the right time can make all the difference.

The act of physically writing a word has even more power than speaking one.

Although this is a principle of some fields of magic, I am not diverging into the wild wood right now.

You see, words convert our jumbled thoughts, feelings, and experiences into a concrete organized thought. They cause us to focus, to eliminate the extraneous, and to solidify what we think into a non-fluid form. Having to choose these words may well kick us off whatever fence we’ve been sitting on, because it forces us to really look at how we think and feel.

Writing the words is more than just recording a moment in your life, more even than just stimulating another area of your brain. Not that those factors aren’t important, it has been proven that physically writing your notes improves retention of the subject matter by more than twenty percent, which is kind of a big deal.

The bigger deal is that the journal isn’t for anyone but you.

So when you write those words, they are effectively a contract with yourself. No one will read them, at least not while you are alive. No one will judge your run on sentences, that comma splice, or the fact that you have never been able to accurately spell ‘separate’ . You don’t need to worry about another person’s feelings, or waste energy on that mask we all wear in public, the one that makes us appear ‘normal’.

You can, in short, figure out what you really think.

I know, that sounds simple. I assure you, however, that it isn’t always easy. Our worlds are full of noise, and all of it tells us what we should think, how we should feel, and all the myriad ways in which we suck and some product or procedure would make us suck just a little less. Bombarded with enough of this, it can be difficult to find what tiny part of the chaotic din is actually our own voice.

Failure to listen to our own voice, failure to act in line with how we really feel, that causes pain, frustration, avoidance, anger, and even depression.

The journal isn’t going to eliminate these things altogether. It isn’t snake oil that cures everything from thinning hair to cancer. It is just a tool, and one that as its name implies (Jour is French for day), should be used daily.

If you are not sure where to start, or what to say to yourself, there are a number of guided journaling resources available online, many of which are free. Which one is going to be most helpful to you depends entirely on where you are now, and where you want to go. Like every other journey, the important thing is to keep going.

Cheers,

Michelle