Thirty-five years ago today, on December 24, 1989, I wrote my first journal entry.  It was the last week of the 1980s and less than a month before I turned eighteen.  I am now fifty-two, almost fifty-three, and I journaled again this morning, as I do most mornings.  As I wrote, I came up with the idea I’d like to explore in this essay:  who I, as a person, might have become had I never journaled.  Yet before I try to answer it, I’d like to share a little of what led me to journal in the first place.  It wasn’t pleasure or curiosity, or a new and clever idea I got from a book.  It was desperation.  I had thoughts and feelings bursting out of me, and in my screwed-up family, at age seventeen, I had no one to share them with.  I was in such pain and confusion—and traumatized too.  So that brings me to my first thought about who I would have become had I not journaled:  I suspect I would have become someone who had to shut down in order to survive.  I would have had to push down my feelings into to my unconscious—and bury them behind psychological defenses.

Or maybe I just would have gone crazy.  I really think that is a possibility.  I think I might simply have blown a gasket if I hadn’t found the outlet of journaling.  There was just too much painful emotion inside of me for me to handle, and I’m afraid had journaling not been an option, it would have come leaking out some metaphorical side channel of my psyche.  I was already walking the line of having certain obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors, and occasional paranoid thoughts too—and without journaling I think these things might have grown out of control and taken me over…

But let me shift a little and think about another thing that would have happened to me without journaling.  This I am sure of:  that without journaling I could not possibly have gotten to know myself as well as I have.  So much of my journaling over the past thirty-five years has been an exploration—of myself, my history, my thoughts, my behavior, my dreams, my hopes, my memories.  And also it’s been a massive analysis:  an attempt to make sense of everything I put down on paper.  It’s hard for me to consider what my life would be like without having made this analysis, because the person I am now, the person considering this question, is the person who has resulted from the analysis.  So that, perhaps, answers my question:  that I would be a person so much more in the dark about myself than I am now.  I would be so much less self-knowing.  Less aware of the place from which I came—and probably a lot more self-hating too, because I would have found so much less in myself to love.

Also, I probably would have stayed a lot closer to my parents had I never journaled, because my journaling definitively showed me just how terrible they were.  And had I stayed closer to them I would have been so much more miserable than I am now, because they made me miserable—and were quite happy to keep me that way.  Also, in some ways I was a lot more like them when I was younger, and that made me hate myself too—because in so many ways they were bad role models.  By figuring this out, and by getting away from them, and by changing myself from the inside out, I found it so much easier to love myself—because I became such a better person, so much healthier and more open and more honest and more forthright.

But as I write this, I ask myself if perhaps I could have found some substitute for a journal—such as a therapist, a good psychotherapist.  Well, here I can answer that easily:  I highly doubt I could have, because actually I tried!  And I tried a number of psychotherapists, some highly recommended, over the years, and never found one who remotely helped me as much as my journaling did.  And a few of them were downright awful—and hurtful.  In fact, they were much more like my parents than they were like me.  The best thing I did was to get away from them—and to keep journaling.

So I think I’ll wrap up this essay here.  In short, had I not journaled these past thirty-five years I’d be so much less of a self-knowing person—and, sadly, I fear, so much less useful to others as a result.

So on this special anniversary in my life, I send you all greetings!

Daniel

P.S. I’d like to link to a few videos I’d made about journaling over the years.  May they be of use to you!

1) Why Journaling Can Be So Awkward — A Psychological Exploration

2)  Q&A: How Do We Journal Properly?

3) Self-Therapy & Healing Childhood Trauma (this is part 1 of a 3-part video, and has some good mentions of journaling in it)