Why haven't you started a journal yet user?

Yes. They are not worth recording and my writing is juvenile, undisciplined, bad

Is this not a journal?

It would speed up my suicide.

I don't think so. I don't record my own experiences, just random ideas I get.

i did, it was a buncha depressed drivel and recordings of weirdass dreams i had, which i accidentally left back home when i left for college, which led to my dad finding and reading it, despite me writing for anyone finding it to not read it (like some anxious insecure teenager), and giving me a worried phone call because he thought i was suicidal

I keep separate text files for daily pontifications, quotes from books, movies, word list, useful phrases

I have but the only thing I keep track of is work so I can look at how little work I'm doing and shame myself into doing more.

sacre bleu

Write in it every Sunday, the weeks go by so fast it makes me sad. I write whats on my mind, what I have planned, why my plans fell through, how lonely it is, how I feel at the moment and during the past week.
I started it at the beginning of the year and am very happy with it. It helps me collect my thoughts at the end/beginning of each week.

What would be the difference between me throwing this journal away or storing it after I fill it?

What for?

Why should I? Nothing about my life is worth documenting.

OP-kun why have you scribbled so many things out??

Anxious?

nah, when I write poems I scribble out old lines so I can tell them apart from the revisions

I do this too. I had it in my bag when grabbing drinks after work the other day and the people I was with found it. They were acting all blown away by my potential but I know my ruminations are the most basic shit going.

me too

Are you sure? They could be right.
If anyone found my "journal" I would be very embarrassed.

I have a notebook
It's a weird mix of essays,diaries,philosophy,critique and my experiences with lucid dreaming.

it will only get better if you start writing it down

This post made me pick up an old diary and write a few pages of thoughts about a little story I'm working on, so maybe I'll try to get back into the discipline. I wrote pretty consistently when I was 14 and 15 and even though rereading it is mostly an embarrassing experience, I do appreciate that window of reflection into my teenage emotional state, see what's changed. I find myself unsatisfied with the rather basic vocabulary I use when only writing to myself about myself - I don't know why, it's not like I'm trying to impress anyone, but despite all my reading I haven't yet learnt to gracefully write a pretty word. So I guess I should work on that.

I do but currently I'm feeling guilty or afraid to confront my better self. When I was writing my journal I was more aware of all actions and thus I was able to act more wisely through reflection. But I've slipped into another cycle of self destruction and now I am too afraid to read what I've already learned. Too afraid to own up to my actions. So I haven't touched it in 2 weeks out of that fear.

>Not encrypting your journal

Plebeian

Just add to it then user.
If you fill it with both successes and mistakes, then the next time you hit a self-destruction cycle you won't be so afraid.
Don't put your 'perfect' self onto paper, it will do nothing other than make you hate yourself more.

I've been regularly writing since 2013. I find that my writing has improved a lot since then.

I have a journal hidden in my wardrobe somewhere. The first entry is sometime in 2012 I believe and the latest is maybe summer 2016(im not sure exactly) Its only use was to vent when I was very very depressed so theres alot of "i hate my life, I want to kill myself" stuff.

Whats interesting to me about it, is that I have never looked back over it, so if I ever do, which I may not, it will be quasi-new information. I do intend to do a "life update" in it before I go away to the States for the summer.

I started a journal back in 2014 in the grips of the worst depression I have ever experienced.

Not trying to be edgy, but it was probably the closest I came to suicide, having for the first time experienced some very intense psychosomatic effects of what was otherwise years worth of a steady burn of depression. Normally it had been shit, but it never got this bad.

Things had escalated during my first big break up and I literally could not move out of the house for a few weeks and all seemed lost. Complete mental collapse.

Out of blind faith, I picked up a journal. I was willing to try anything, including a brief stint at a therapist.

After that point, during a few years, some serious mental house cleaning took place, much aided by a journal, and I grew a habit of writing it. It became a source of comfort. I would dissect my depression, my flaws, all that is wrong, left and right, until I filled a whole book. Looking back, it is all very self-indulgent: hardly ever do I mention anybody else in this book other than myself.

Then.. I got better, and suddenly huge gaps appeared in the pages. Weeks. Months. I immersed myself back into the flow of life and as such I found it difficult to find a reason to put anything down in words. Why bother?

Part of me missed the comfort of misery and carrying this little book around into which I could vent - and no doubt it helped me clear up a lot of shit - but I also worry that if you indulge in this too much things like depression and isolation will only increase.

I hardly ever write about anything good that happened, even though there have been plenty of great days - it is always some shit that makes me seem like a victim of X or Y, impotent and angry, pointless.

So it has been a weird experience so far. Currently I try to avoid writing too much about >muh feelings and instead try and focus on documenting the people and external events of my life, when I do actually write. Also general notes on personal philosophy with a more pro-active bent.

The difficulty of doing this has shown be the extent of my self-absorbed nature, so a part of me avoids it out of discomfort, and a part of me realises that the benefits of journals are perhaps precisely evident only when they are truly hard to write.

Any anons relate to this?

I've been writing since october 2015 and I almost always carry it with me. I write poems, daily experiences, my plans for the future, and sometimes pseudo-philosophical bullshit or bad film theory. It really helps, and I've collected poems a bit of prose to turn it into a poetry book. I would happily write some of it here but it's mostly in french.

I hoped it would help with my bad handwriting but I guess I'm fucked and it will always look like shit. I mostly write when I'm in the public transport anyway. I must look really weird when I write - I'm a chubby awkward nerd so that doesn't help.

I would also add to this that many people seem misunderstand the point of a journal and I made this mistake myself.

It is not so that you can literally document every single banal detail of your daily routine, but to be a process (writing) by which you arrive at some type of truth, and you can go about this in a myriad of ways... free thought association, a short story, poem, or a particular story in a particular day, but don't put pressure on yourself by thinking "nothing extraordinary happened today thus there is nothing to say"

Pessoa sat around in his flat and his office all his life (apparently) and wrote great things - this is what I mean.

If life is routine, you've identified a problem, don't write a single page until you detect the first change - then write it down immediately

I definitely relate. My journal also made my writing better

age

Woke up this morning
Got myself a gun

I woke up, it was 7, I waited 'til 11 just to figure out that no one would call. I think I've got a lot of friends but I don't hear from them. What's another night all alone?

Woke up in the morning
Grabbed myself a beer!

KEK. This is why you write your journal in a text file, on a computer nobody will ever have access to except yourself.

That's what you think.

*traces your IP*

>I hoped it would help with my bad handwriting but I guess I'm fucked and it will always look like shit.
If you actually care enough about this, I would gladly suggest following a handwriting program (e.g. Palmer Method) and deliberately practicing. Some things are just won't improve that much just by doing it a lot, and you need to focus on fixing the specific problems you're having.