You know something I realised when I sat down to write in my journal yesterday? I have terrible handwriting.
I mean, I know from my day job that my handwriting is bad, but that’s when I’m writing in a hurry. In my journal, I’m making an effort to use my ‘best handwriting’ and yet it is still barely legible and looks a lot like a spider stepped in some ink and then scurried back and forth across the page.
But anyway…
I wrote yesterday about starting a journal as a way to get me back into the habit of writing, and in just a few days of doing it, I found that there’s something ‘liberating’ about writing something that you know no-one will ever read. And I don’t just mean “No-one else”, I mean “no-one”, not even me. How many people who keep a journal (okay, okay, A Diary!) go back and read old entries? And for those that do, how often?
I’d wager it’s not very many and not very often.
I kept a diary as a teenager, from when I was about sixteen for a couple of years, and even though I have looked back at it on one or two occasions since then, I can’t say I’ve ever really “read it”.
It’s not like I expect there to be hundreds of people reading what I write here or on Facebook or Twitter—in fact, I know the numbers are quite small from the traffic stats in WordPress—but a journal is truly something private, something ‘intimate’. Something that contains your inner-most thoughts, hopes & fears.
And yes, it’s quite liberating to write that. I suppose it’s a fairly cheap and rudimentary form of therapy—for both the mind and the soul.