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(My comment, grown out of control.)
My (paper) journaling has been so irregular. It's not at all unusual for me to have gaps of months or years with nothing written down.
I have a journal from high school, which consists exclusively of angst filled writings after fighting with someone and moaning about unrequited love, and which has lots of empty pages which will probably never be filled because I find it hard to write in a journal without paging back to earlier stuff, and that stuff is so... embarrassing or toxic or something.
On the other hand, I have a couple of journals where I was aiming to write a page a day for some predetermined period (say, a summer). This only played out when I was alone a lot; in one of them I suddenly get friends and start abandoning the journal for weeks at a time and then have hopeless amounts of catching up to do when I do write.
More recently, I have about a journal and a half with intermittent entries-- poems I liked, drawings of things in art museums, reflections on specific events outside the usual scope of my life, taped in letters from friends, and only occasional commentary on things that actually count as daily life. A few math problems.
For a little while at Carleton I tried to keep a journal in order to better regulate my emotions or deal with them or something, but it felt like a chore, and such an unpleasant one. It's awful (for me anyway) to feel like I have to sit there and think about my feelings, and it was especially bad because I was depressed at the time. (Can't remember whether I was admitting that or not... or registering that it was somehow different from how life should be, even.)
Oh, and I have school notebooks where I got sick of listening to class and started writing journals instead. One is from French class, so it is in French. Except when the vocabulary is too much of a pain to circumambulate.
I love to look back at these things (except the pure angst ones), so when I stop writing altogether for awhile, I tend to try to find some way of starting again. The best for me is to make a daily habit for awhile, so I learn how to have the sense that I'd like to sit down and write occasionally. So that it is an activity that comes to my mind when I am sitting around.
I'm not sure why I like to have these things around-- I'm not afraid of losing the memories-- I lose memories like crazy (like everyone), but losing stories and so on doesn't bother me too much. What bothers me is not being able to picture people in my mind, and a journal won't help that. Also, it's so inevitable, and for me so fast, that I can't really sustain worries about it. Perhaps it is just my innate fascination with things that are written down. (Can I blame my day spent reading blogs of middle and high school math teachers on this too? Please say yes. Otherwise it has to be about my fear of cup products, which I do not wish to acknowledge.)
My (paper) journaling has been so irregular. It's not at all unusual for me to have gaps of months or years with nothing written down.
I have a journal from high school, which consists exclusively of angst filled writings after fighting with someone and moaning about unrequited love, and which has lots of empty pages which will probably never be filled because I find it hard to write in a journal without paging back to earlier stuff, and that stuff is so... embarrassing or toxic or something.
On the other hand, I have a couple of journals where I was aiming to write a page a day for some predetermined period (say, a summer). This only played out when I was alone a lot; in one of them I suddenly get friends and start abandoning the journal for weeks at a time and then have hopeless amounts of catching up to do when I do write.
More recently, I have about a journal and a half with intermittent entries-- poems I liked, drawings of things in art museums, reflections on specific events outside the usual scope of my life, taped in letters from friends, and only occasional commentary on things that actually count as daily life. A few math problems.
For a little while at Carleton I tried to keep a journal in order to better regulate my emotions or deal with them or something, but it felt like a chore, and such an unpleasant one. It's awful (for me anyway) to feel like I have to sit there and think about my feelings, and it was especially bad because I was depressed at the time. (Can't remember whether I was admitting that or not... or registering that it was somehow different from how life should be, even.)
Oh, and I have school notebooks where I got sick of listening to class and started writing journals instead. One is from French class, so it is in French. Except when the vocabulary is too much of a pain to circumambulate.
I love to look back at these things (except the pure angst ones), so when I stop writing altogether for awhile, I tend to try to find some way of starting again. The best for me is to make a daily habit for awhile, so I learn how to have the sense that I'd like to sit down and write occasionally. So that it is an activity that comes to my mind when I am sitting around.
I'm not sure why I like to have these things around-- I'm not afraid of losing the memories-- I lose memories like crazy (like everyone), but losing stories and so on doesn't bother me too much. What bothers me is not being able to picture people in my mind, and a journal won't help that. Also, it's so inevitable, and for me so fast, that I can't really sustain worries about it. Perhaps it is just my innate fascination with things that are written down. (Can I blame my day spent reading blogs of middle and high school math teachers on this too? Please say yes. Otherwise it has to be about my fear of cup products, which I do not wish to acknowledge.)