Journaling, Part Three: Overcoming Obstacles and Making the Practice Your Own
This is part three of a three-part series.
In part one, I shared my 27-year journaling practice, which began as a way to process emotions and has since become a vital tool for mental health and personal growth.
In part two, I emphasized the importance of choosing a journal that feels like a tool, not a treasure, and how different journaling methods suit different moods and situations.
Having explored the various tools and methods in my previous post, let's address the emotional barriers that often hold people back.
Permission to Find Your Path
It's perfectly okay if traditional journaling isn't helpful for you. In that case, your task is to discover what is helpful. For some people, processing happens through more active engagement — walking, swimming, gardening — or through activities requiring different kinds of focus or dexterity like painting, knitting, or woodworking.
Your processing tool might not look like a journal at all, and that's completely valid.
Freedom from Perfection
If you do connect with journaling but feel inhibited by that persistent voice insisting your journal should be aesthetically pleasing or filled with profound insights, I encourage you to keep experimenting. That voice is standing between you and a potentially transformative practice.
Clients sometimes tell me they feel guilty or like they’ve failed at journaling because they’re not consistent, meaning they don’t write every day. This is simply not true! I’ve gone for weeks and months without journaling, and when life calms down or the deadline passes, I pick it up again.
Your journal is a tool, not a performance. It is for you and, if you wish, only you.
various journals, c. 2010-2016
The Beauty of the "Lived-In" Journal
I'd challenge you to see just how "lived in" you can make your journal. Make it look used, loved, worn, weathered. Take it everywhere — let the covers get ragged and stained from being shoved into your bag or carried in the rain or written in while waiting for appointments. Use it not just for profound reflections but for mundane grocery lists, half-formed ideas, messy sketches, or random observations.
Breaking the Rules
Your journal doesn't need to follow any predetermined format. Paste in photos, receipts, or ticket stubs. Draw stick figures or elaborate illustrations. Write sideways across the page. Skip days or weeks without guilt.
Love making lists? Try journaling in list form.
For minimalists: try a one-sentence daily journal.
Are you a visual thinker? Try a photo, collage, watercolor, or sketching journal to combine words and images.
Trying to cultivate mindfulness and positivity? Try gratitude-focused journal entries.
Is concrete thinking easier than abstract thinking? Try a calendar journal where you briefly capture the events of the day. Weather, where you went, who you saw, what happened.
The point of the journal is to make it uniquely yours — it exists for you and your process, whatever that may be.
Keep an archive of your writing or burn the entire journal if you wish.
The Ultimate Freedom
Let the journal be a safe place to practice being your gloriously imperfect self. Include half-formed ideas, grief, joy, mistakes, regret, the messiness of relationships and life. Let it be experimental, boring, defiant, honest, mediocre.
Omit the date. Mix media freely. Leave pages blank. Write badly. Complain, be unreasonable, repeat yourself and ruminate all you want — pour it all out! The journal pages are patient and steadfast; they will never tell you to “get over it.” And if you let yourself be truthful, you’ll know when you’ve processed enough to stop writing — at least for today.
Remember that these pages belong entirely to you. No one needs to see them unless you choose to share. You can keep them forever as a record of your journey, or you can make a ritual of releasing their contents—tearing out pages or even burning an entire journal when you're ready to close a chapter.
The practice is yours to define.
