Journaling

I’ve been working lately on a book about Journaling- a book for young people to encourage them to keep a journal. The book is a combination of thoughts about journaling and relevant entries that reflect or exemplify those thoughts from my own journals (which I have kept since I was fifteen). Here’s an excerpt I wrote recently.

There is something about journal writing that goes hand in hand with a crisis — an event that is emotionally painful. I don’t know that it is terribly important to figure out why that is. There is a whole body of science that deals with the benefits of getting to the bottom of a person’s feelings and of sharing them with another person. When we are having problems in our lives, we see a school counselor or a doctor, someone who listens to us. And the very act of communicating what we feel to another is therapeutic. Healing comes from sharing what we feel with someone else. Maybe writing in a journal heals us that way too — we get what is bothering us off our chest.
I don’t like to look at journal writing as a place where I can dump whatever I want, although I do. I don’t like to look at it as a source of healing, although I am sure it is and has been in ways that I do not know.My journal is a blank page where expression of any kind can take place.
I think of those caves in France and Spain where our ancestors crawled in thousands of years ago and painted pictures of bison and antelope with paints made out from ground colored rocks. No one seems to know exactly the purpose of those pictures. Some say they were religious symbols. Others say they represent their view of the world. Other say they were just representing what they saw. Some of the walls on those caves are very difficult to get to. And some of the pictures are high on the walls, which means they had to carry materials to make steeples to reach those places. Why all the work? What is it about expression that is so important? There is a part of me that understands the graffiti artist who sprays his signature on a building as if to say, “I exist.” But what about the caveman who painted in the depths of a cave that was clearly inaccessible even twelve thousand years ago. Or what about a person who writes in a journal that he knows will never be read by anyone? What is the point of this kind of expression? Is something worth doing if there is no point to it?