Journey Through A Journal

Before this class, I had been wanting to begin journalizing* for quite a long time. I have at least half a dozen unused notebooks of various sizes spread out around my room. Keeping a journal was just the sort of thing that seemed to work better in theory than in practice. It was easy to buy pretty journals when I saw them in stores, and then promise myself that I would start using them. But when push came to shove, life got in the way– I had school and chores and a social life.

Like most college students, I find myself constantly complaining about tests, group projects, and complicated assignments. College is not easy. In fact, it's extremely stressful. Yet, something must be said about deadlines. I might curse deadlines on occasion, but there's no denying that at the end of the day, they are the simple best motivating tool I've ever encountered.

I never got around to writing journal entries on my own because no one gave me a deadline. In other words, no one was forcing me to. There just wasn't any sort of pressure to do anything, so I kept pushing it back, swearing that I would get around to it "eventually."

I guess that's one of the reasons I enjoyed writing journal entries for this course: because I finally got motivated to do something I'd wanted to do for a long time. I ended up doing around 40+ entries [I'll verify the number and edit this post later]. The rules were pretty simple: the entries had to "flow" out of our heads. Back in January, the professor said something along the lines of a stream of consciousness or a stream of thoughts. Do you know that feeling when you're talking to someone, and all of a sudden you get distracted and lose your train of thought? That's how I personally interpreted this activity: you had to get on a train of thought, start writing, and not get off the train until at least ten minutes passed.

It's definitely easier said than done. The rules were pretty simple: we couldn't cross anything out; we didn't have to worry about grammar in general; we couldn't overthink or get too logical; we had to "go for the jugular"; and no matter what happened, we couldn't stop moving our hand.

When I first started writing the entries, I felt stiff. There's no other way to describe it. It was supposed to be a writing exercise that freed us from the limitations of academic writing, but strangely enough, the writing felt forced. It didn't come as naturally as I'd originally thought. As the weeks passed, however, something began to change. By my 12th or 13th entry, I realized that little by little I was making more and more mistakes– but I was caring less and less about making them.

The first rule was definitely the hardest. As I was writing, I tried my best to let my thoughts flow... But whenever the timer ended I found myself re-reading what I'd just written, and my hand always itched to fix any mistakes. Even if no one was going to read the entry, it felt weird to see simple grammar mistakes and not cross them out.

I decided to do one of my journal entries immediately after watching one particular movie. Usually, ten minutes to write a journal felt like an unnecessarily long amount of time. But in this case, I felt like it just wasn't enough. I had so much I wanted to write down, so many ideas going through my mind simultaneously, that I felt like I could write for hours. I definitely loved that feeling.

The process of writing a journal was one of the best experiences I've had in any college class. I've spent so much of my time focused on my external journeys, that I never took time to appreciate all the interestingly complex internal journeys that I go through every single day.

[To be further edited]