Why journaling is important to Amanda
Stu posted "Why journaling is important to Stuart" a while back, and I thought I would add my reasons.
As I'm sure most of you know (if you've been reading the posts for any length of time) I'm a self-employed writer. This can have great advantages (no boss to deal with!) and its own disadvantages (a terrible boss to deal with!).
I spend long periods of time inside my own head. Sometimes this can be great fun. Other times... I don't have the same distractions from my thoughts that I had when I worked at 'a proper job', so when things are tough, I can chew over the same things, until they become bigger than reality.
Right now, I'm feeling stretched thin. My mother is very unwell, I have a book to edit, I have another in the planning stages, there's the never-ending cycle of marketing... The world and his brother appears to want a piece of me at times.
When my head is too full of noise, I try to journal. Unlike Stu, I don't go for anything structured. Usually, I just need to empty my head, and so large tracts of paper suffice.
My go-to journal is a B5 behemoth from Bomo (try saying that after a few drinks!). It has a gazillion pages (192) and is BIG (25 x 17 cm). The paper plays fairly nicely with fountain pens (as long as I don't try to use my big guns), but is also perfectly happy with gel pens, ballpoints, pencils etc.
If B5 is a bit too big, the journals do also come in A5 size (see here for the Atelier cover and here for the Travelling one).
As a slight aside, my running buddy and I had a long discussion one day about internal monologues... it turned out that both he and I have a non-stop voice chattering away in our heads, and it came as a bit of a surprise to find out that there are people who don't. My Mum doesn't; his wife doesn't. They both have 'thoughts' but they're not a voice and they do actually shut up quite a lot. If it was ever quiet inside my head, I think I would die of surprise.
Anyway, possibly because my internal monologue never shuts up, journaling for me is often closer to 'Morning Pages' than anything else - a stream of consciousness, getting things out of my head (so that they don't keep going round and round). 192 pages will come in handy!
There's not necessarily any resolution to anything after I've journaled. It's not that by doing it I've necessarily found any startling insights that had eluded me until then. It seems that letting the non-stop voice in my head have a bit of the spotlight, instead of me trying to ignore it, lets other things drift up.
Whatever the reason, I do know that my mental health is always better when I do my 'morning pages' journaling more often.
