Journaling

Questions and model answers

1. Do you keep a journal?

   I did for about two years and then I stopped, and I've never worked out whether that was a loss. What I wrote was almost entirely complaints. Reading it back a year later, the good days aren't in there at all. I only ever reached for it when something was wrong, so the record makes that whole period look much worse than it actually was. There's a whole summer in there that I remember as fine and the notebook remembers as awful. That's the part that bothers me. It isn't a diary, it's a log of bad evenings. Starting again, I'd want a rule that forced something onto the page on ordinary days, because those are the ones I genuinely can't remember now.

2. Would you rather keep a journal on paper or on a device?

   Paper, and the reason is embarrassing rather than principled. On a device I edit. I write a sentence, decide it sounds self-pitying, and soften it before I have even finished the thought, so what gets saved is a version I have already tidied for an audience that does not exist. Nobody is going to read it. I tidy it anyway. On paper the crossing-out stays visible, which is uncomfortable and is the actual record of what I thought before I improved it. The practical arguments all run the other way and I will admit them. Digital is searchable, backed up, and always in my pocket, and I once lost a notebook I would still like back. I have not switched.

3. Tell me about a time writing something down changed how you saw it.

   There was a stretch after a bad appraisal at work when I wrote every night for about three weeks. It did not make me feel better and I am not sure that is what it was for. What it did was separate two things I had been carrying around as one lump. Some of it was that my manager was right about the deadlines. The rest was that she said it in front of other people. Written down those are obviously different problems with different fixes, and in my head they had been a single sentence that just meant I was bad at my job. I could only fix one of them. Knowing which one took a notebook.

4. Do you think journaling is essential to understanding your own thoughts and feelings?

   Useful for some people and nowhere near essential, and I would push back on the word itself. If writing were essential to understanding what you feel, then most of human history managed without access to it, and plenty of people I know who have never kept a journal read a room better than I do. What writing gives you is a second pass. You have the thought once as a feeling and again as a sentence, and the second one is slower and can be argued with. Talking to somebody does the same job and adds a person who asks questions. It is one route among several. What makes it the default is that it costs nothing and needs nobody else.

The Korean translation, the expression breakdowns, the reusable frames and the common-mistake notes for these four questions are in the book. The recording and this transcript are free, here and on YouTube.