Keeping a diary

[richburn]

I have started scribble notes in a diary, filled one pad already. Does anybody else find it therapeutic and do you ever go back and read it? Do you address it to yourself or...? Do you put everything in there, even stuff your ashamed to tell other people?

 

Love

Richard x

[preraph]

My journal was invaluable to me. Iwrote just about every night during the busiest time in my life, volumes. I went through a very bad time when I lost my career and it had deep personal relationship aspects going way back to it as well, and ended up with ptsd and long-term depression. I had never gone in and reread my journals except maybe a bit here or there trying to find a date when something happened.

 

After years of depression and being angry and isolating, when internet became reality, I used it to research toxic waste I was exposed to. I had found a website mapping and analyzing my neighborhood on the subject. So that led me to go to my journal to find names of past doctors, etc.

 

That took me to where my journal began a retrospective bringing my history up to date. I got hooked and spent three days with very little sleep reading 900 pages of handwritten journals. Reading and crying. I gained so much insight into myself, on both small and large things.

 

One relationship that had really caused me to have to block to get past it had caused me at the time to just have to just accept it must be all in my head and that there was no real relationship there. So I'd blocked it out as much as possible to keep from dwelling on it. Reading the journal decades later, I clearly saw in the journal it was a real relationship, just one with a fatal flaw. Over time I'd found out what was really going on. It was a personal problem the guy had that he wasn't communicating well about that had left me just feeling crazy, like I was imagining things, and not trusting my own judgment. Now I was able to pull that part of me back and regain my self-trust.

 

Following that had been a big trust breach with a bf and best friend. Reading the journal showed me how much crap had happened to me in a very short time and just gave me a perspective on my life.

 

The most important thing is that reading my journals brought me back from depression, on shakey legs, to be sure, but my life surged back into me because I remembered who I was and how I got to be who I was. Truly, one thing I got out of it is that I was probably the strongest person I knew. I broke like a ceramic ashtray because I was so strong. It was my whole identity I'd worked hard to create on the line, the loss of that and the disconnect from music, the loss of trust in myself and everyone else. It was a lot.

 

I rose from the ashes because I kept a diary all those years.

 

She rose from the underground,

energy building like a storm

black duster slapping elevator heels

Robotic scoping viewfinder eyes

blue this time

swept the room before the arched doors closed with a thud behind her

 

Stripped like a twig and raw

life hitting her like air on scraped skin

Hyperhuman paleorgasmic darlingale

lashing back like a whip

cracking like lighting and ripping the sky

her cloak flapping behind her as she rode into the pale

[richburn]

Preraph,

 

Thanks for the reply, I am going to re-read my diary's just not for a month or so. I am thinking of having different diaries for different things.

 

One for my inner child work

One for my daily musings

and one for my therapy work.

 

I have a look at some of the early entries and they sounded so negative, good to know I have made some progress.

[preraph]

Yes, it's best to not read them too often because you want to be objective when you read them, and that's already difficult, so the more time passes, the better. Plus you want to see patterns and those are over years sometimes, not days.

 

I started with a dream journal several years before when I was self-studying psychology and did that for 7 years and then began a total journal and put everything in it: diary entries, poetry, dreams, reviews. It's a good thing to do. You can really let go in a diary and get it all out. It's really important to keep the diary hidden so you know no one can read it. I think it would be a little iffy to put it online because of how not private the internet is. But you could do a Word program. There's something more personal about taking that book to bed with you or laying down on the sofa and writing in it longhand, though. It's therapeutic. And your handwriting can also be looked at later. You can see the anger or, well, drunkenness. Hah.