I haven’t journalled in a while, and I find myself thinking, if I’m talking so much all the time about how good, important and valuable journalling is, then why haven’t I done it lately? And I think about it a little bit more and I realize it’s because I feel like I have “journalled enough”. More thinking reveals that this isn’t exactly true, that’s a summary that’s so low-res that it’s smudged out. Next I get to “I have a big backlog of past journal entries that I haven’t revisited, and so writing new ones feels like it’s ‘just adding to the pile'”. And here I find myself thinking, ah. There’s an immediate therapeutic value to journalling for its own sake, and there’s a second value to revisiting it, but there’s (for me) some psychic cost in building up lots of unread journals. So here some clarity presents itself. I could journal and then just straight up delete what I just wrote. That’s an option. But really what I think needs to happen is I need to “unclench” my thinking around the new journals… and, of course, address the fact that I haven’t revisited the old entries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even here I realize the summary is low-res and smudged. Because I HAVE revisited my old journal entries before, but in ways that felt incomplete and unproductive. There’s something about me that makes me hesitate to… pick up that project again. Why? I guess it’s because I feel like I have “other more important things to do”, like… all of the writing I’m “supposed” to do. Which, having thought out loud, I pretty quickly realize is kinda silly, because it’s not like I’m going to do very good writing from a sense of obligation and fear. My best writing happens when I’m in a state of play, and it’s hard to be playful when I feel like I have unmet, unaddressed obligations looming over me. And I don’t even necessarily need to finish<\/em> all of those tasks and projects, I really just need to face them, discuss them, renegotiate them, to decide<\/em> what I’m going to do with them. It’s the indecision that really weighs on me. So now it becomes clear to me that, even making some sketchy plans for “read X book on monday, update Y on tuesday, watch Z movie on wednesday, read W old journals on thursday” (in a little more detail than this, that’s what a calendar is for) will free up the psychic energy I need to write more spiritedly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n