I write in a journal most mornings. Nobody reads it. I barely read it. The handwriting is so bad that future archaeologists would assume it's a new language and spend decades trying to decode what turns out to be a grocery list interleaved with low-grade existential dread.
This is fine. This is, in fact, the point.
Somewhere along the way, journaling got absorbed into the productivity-wellness complex. It acquired bullet points, habit trackers, morning pages protocols, gratitude templates, and a dedicated section of the stationery industry that charges forty dollars for a notebook with "Be Present" embossed on the cover. Journaling became A Practice with a capital P, complete with optimal timing, recommended prompts, and the vague implication that if you do it right, you'll achieve clarity and inner peace and possibly better abs.
I'm not doing that. I'm doing the much simpler, much less Instagrammable version: I write down whatever is in my head until my head feels slightly less crowded. Then I close the journal and go make coffee.
No prompts. No structure. No template where I list three gratitudes and one intention and my word-of-the-year for the third time this week because I keep forgetting it. Just words on a page, in whatever order they show up, for however long it takes for my brain to stop buzzing.
Some days it's three lines. Some days it's three pages. Some days I just draw a bad picture of a cup of coffee and write "tired" underneath it and call that a journal entry. All equally valid. All equally useful.
Here's why it works: writing something down gets it out of the loop.
You know the loop. That thing your brain does where it cycles the same three worries on repeat like a broken playlist. You worry about the thing, which makes you think about the other thing, which reminds you of the original thing, and now you've completed a full rotation and you're back to worrying about the thing. The loop can run for hours, days, months. It's incredibly efficient at consuming energy and producing nothing.
Writing breaks the loop. When you put a thought on paper, your brain seems to relax its grip on it slightly. Like it was carrying a bag it assumed nobody else would hold, and when you offer to take it — even onto a page it knows nobody will read — it goes "oh, finally" and lets go.
I don't write to remember things. I write to stop remembering them.
I don't write for insights. Sometimes insights happen — a pattern I hadn't noticed, a feeling I didn't know I had — but that's a bonus, not the goal. The goal is the emptying. The slight lightening. The sense that my head has been tidied, even if the tidy doesn't last past lunchtime.
The journal itself is a physical artefact of this process and it is, frankly, a mess. I write on buses, in waiting rooms, on the kitchen counter while things are boiling. The pages are coffee-stained, cross-referenced with nothing, and occasionally interrupted by phone numbers I wrote down for reasons I'll never remember. It looks like the evidence wall from a detective show about a very boring crime.
I love it. I love that nobody will ever read it. I love that it has no audience, no purpose, and no obligation to be good. In a life where almost everything I write is for someone — emails, messages, documents, posts — this is the one thing that's purely for the act of writing itself. For the thinking that happens between the pen and the page. For the five minutes where I'm not performing, just processing.
If you want to start, here's my only advice: don't buy a nice journal. Buy the cheapest notebook you can find. A nice journal creates pressure to write nice things. A cheap notebook gives you permission to be terrible, boring, and repetitive, which is what you'll actually need to be for this to work.
Write badly. Write boringly. Write the same worry four days in a row until you get tired of your own nonsense and finally move on.
Nobody's reading it. That's the gift.