I’ve tried journaling many times over the years, but for the longest time I wasn’t very successful at it. I found that to keep a successful journal, I needed a couple of things in my jounal:

• It had to be small enough to fit in my purse, or I’d never use it.
• It had to have thinly ruled lines, so I’m not wasting paper when I write. I write small anyway.
• It had to have a top flip; small side bound journals annoy me.

This pretty much meant I was stuck with a moleskine reporters journal. It is currently the only notebook that meets all of those requirements.

I tend to have a poor memory, so I like to have the journal for recording events. One of the things that has been hardest for me is to not edit myself. For a journal to be successful, you need to write down your thoughts and feelings, and not worry that someone is going to find it and read it.

That’s pretty hard for me, my privacy as a child and young adult was regularly violated. Because of that I don’t have a lot of trust for those around me to respect my privacy. I’d like to say as an adult, I realize that kids can’t have total privacy.. but they should have some. They should be able to expect that their family won’t read their journal. I couldn’t. After all it’s somewhere that you can resolve your feelings which can sometimes be hurtful to those around you. One should expect that the ones around you can respect that.

Writing the blog has been hard too - how much do you write without giving everything away? After all, this is out there for the world to read. It’s been an interesting way for me to define my boundaries of what’s private and what’s public, and is as useful as the more private journal.

I also like to make lists, lists of all kinds. Shopping, grocery, camping, colors, gift, book lists, all kinds of lists. A journal is a good place for those kinds of things too. I’ve gone back in my journal and read some pretty interesting lists I’d completely forgotten I’d written.

Do you journal?