It is such a life hack to have a corner in your home to call your work from home office. It was effective for me that I couldn’t open my laptop on weekends to check my blog and do other stuff. So today, I did it differently. It’s Sunday, the last day of another long weekend at my apartment trying to be productive. I set-upped another table in another corner and here I am writing.
Last Sunday, I attended a workshop called “Journaling for Mental Health”. And what are the odds right? I updated in my bio recently, “I just journal my way through mental wellness”. Journaling has been my friend since I was a child. I could remember moments where I’d write pages back to back of just thoughts that were running through my head. I’ve always resorted to writing them because I also have a tendency to forget easily. And when I really want to remember and I can’t, I get frustrated.
So yes, I also once dreamed of being a journalist. Maybe an author as well. But I really don’t have a niche. I was also not a wide reader. I even just started reading non-academic books after college. I did like though scanning through encyclopedias and Almanacs back then because they’re mostly the books we had. I also liked back then writing essays or reviews about books we’ve read or movies we’ve watched.
I liked making scrap books as school projects. And collecting photos. And writing down in my friends’ autographs (only 90s kids will know). I had Friendster blogs, Multiply Blogs, Tumblr and what remains now are Twitter, IG and wordpress/blogger blogs.
So back to the Journaling workshop, it was organized by Scribblory and DFS. It’s a 2 hour workshop. It is interesting. It was my first intimate online workshop since ECQ. It was nice to hear stories and writings and thoughts from people you don’t know. You feel their emotions in their writings.
It is familiar to me that Journaling is a tool to also help people in many ways, particularly with mental health.
There is an episode in Sherlock where Dr John Watson is seeing a therapist for his PTSD, after being a war doctor and getting a limp. His therapist was asking him that he hasn’t been writing anything in his blog/journal. Then I though, “a okay, it’s interesting. So maybe therapists do use writing as a tool”.
As Joyce Pring has described journaling in one of her episodes of her podcast, in journaling,
you kind of have a time capsule to who you were a couple of months weeks or years ago.
I also like this statement,
“capture it before it’s gone.”
Even Francis Kong recommends. He said in his “How to Integrate Work-life Balance in the New Norm” facebook live in the Victory Pioneer page that we are in a journey. We are in history. So it is encouraged to journal. Whatever we write, we will be passing that to the next generation.
This pandemic has taken a toll on all of us. If not physically, financially, then maybe mentally and emotionally.
Some of us are over thinkers. And with all the extra time we have in our hands, there was more space to overthink. So much thoughts running around our heads. And to be honest, writing a journal helps to manage and organize thoughts. It’s therapeutic that sometimes, after writing them down, its as if it makes us feel a little lighter.
We are now on month 6 and Day I don’t know. There’s also a lot of things happening outside. Medical front liners voicing out. The people trying to survive. You can get lost in all these problems if you dwell on it. You can try to do something. You would want to do something. But sometimes, you just don’t know what to do but hope for a better tomorrow.
ANJJ JOURNEY & JOURNALS 