Episode 31: Do you journal?

In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about their relationship with journaling. They discuss when they journal, why they journal, what they journal about, and their favorite types of journals.

Show Notes

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Panda Planner

The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

Transcript

Crys: Hello, friends. This is episode 31 of the Write Away Podcast, and it’s February 18th, 2021 as we are recording this. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost JP Rindfleisch.

JP, how was your week?

JP: Oh, it has been fantastic. So ever since I decided that my morning time block schedule has to be split between two projects that I’m working on because I find both equally important, I have been able to do both very well every day. I guess I can’t decide what to do every day, so instead I just do both. And apparently by doing both, I’m doing more. 

It has actually been really good. I’ve written probably four times the amount that I normally write in a week, so it’s excellent.

How about you?

Crys: Last Thursday was the most chaotic day of my life. It started out great with recording with you and just– it didn’t even go downhill, it just exploded. I’m going to try and tell the short version. 

Short version is I had 30 minutes of mortification as I realized the entire day previous, I had been driving my rental car with the emergency brake on. Then I was in the ocean and the ocean smacked my glasses off my face and I was 20 minutes away in the rental car from home. And I committed the vision-impaired version of drunk driving and drove my car very slowly home.

And then my kid got into what I thought was the locked rental car. I had the keys in my bra. I ran, stopped the car as it rolled out of my driveway. Kid was fine. I was shook. I was shooketh.

And we could not find the keys. I… like they flew out and yeeted themselves into another dimension. We looked for hours. I got a metal detector, couldn’t find it.

Had to pay the $200 for a replacement key, which like in the grand scheme of things, isn’t terrible, but that is $200 I would have loved in my pocket. And then everything is just recovery from that point.

Sunday, I just finally started to feel like myself. Monday, I had a deep trigger point massage therapy thing that really helped.

And then Tuesday, I completely revamped my upstairs living space, which had been also in chaos since my deadlines last month. And I had this realization that I think that the chaos was keeping me from being productive. So I cleaned everything. I moved my office from my kind of living room area into where is supposed to be my kid’s bedroom. But he just sleeps with me. So I’m like, now it’s my office. So now I have a standing desk, and I have a sitting desk, and I have a laying down desk, which is the spare bed. And I finally started plotting my next book yesterday. So I think the organizational cleaning bit  really helped.

JP:  I’ve definitely noticed every time that I clean everything feels so much better.

Crys: I can’t wait to do our review. We’re recording our tarot review on Tuesday. And I honestly can’t remember, I have a terrible memory, I can’t remember what my February is. And I’m really interested to review what I said I thought it would be like, and I do remember that I said I would have a fuck it moment. And my February fuck it moment was Thursday with the glasses thing and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m getting Lasik.”

And I made that appointment on Saturday, and now I drive in Monday for my exam, Tuesday, if the exam goes well, I get my surgery. And then Wednesday I have a follow-up exam, and then I come home. Fuck it, I’m getting it done.

JP: It sounds like a maddening week, to say the least.

Crys: Not much got done workwise, but I am just proud of myself for getting anything done.

JP: I’m with you right there, 100%. Madness.

Crys: Okay. So our question this week was just something you threw at me last night and that was, do you journal? And so we wanted to talk about that because the answer was, we try, for both of us. So a follow up question from me to you, why do you want to journal?

JP: So I want to journal because I’ve kept journals whenever I go on trips.

I really like going back to them every once in a while because it immediately takes me back to the memory of being there. And so I really like those points in time because, especially if I want to go back for writing, I can remember what that place felt like, I can remember some pieces to it. But yeah, so more or less, the reason I want to journal is because I want to use it as a tool to improve writing.

Crys: I have clearly the world’s worst memory, probably not the world’s worst, but I have a pretty terrible memory. And there are just wide gaps of time where like I know I was in college, I know I roomed with people, but the details of things are completely gone. And this is a symptom, I believe, of hardcore depression. It messes with your memory.

Childhood trauma, all that delicious stuff has really messed with my memory. And so one of the reasons that I do it is because I won’t remember otherwise. Those times, those moments, those learnings, those experiences are just gone. I am much better about it when I’m on trips because I do tend to be in much more of a reflective and comparison mode.

But there are journals that I have not gone back to because I wasn’t ready. I was in Rwanda for two weeks in 2007. So it was the 20-year anniversary of the last of the Rwandan genocide battles, and the biggest one. And we stayed with Rwandan families for half the trip and did these weird internships and also went to visit a lot of cultural memorials having to do with the genocide.

And so that was a very intense trip. And I wrote a lot and then I set it aside and found the journal at one point and had this visceral oh no reaction. So I have not looked back on it in 14 years now. And in the last five or so years, I’ve been like, the next time I find that journal, because it’s in a box somewhere, I think I’ll be ready.  And of course over this last year, I’ve been journaling more, but I still do go months where I don’t journal. And I’m better about journaling the terrible things than the positive things. And I would like to also journal the positive things.

Do you find that you record more of some type of thing than another?

JP: So I just honestly go in bits and bobs of writing. It’s because I’m trying to find what process works best for me. And what happened last time that I got into a pretty good stride with daily writing was that it was too structured. And I was using like a Panda planner with a gratitude portion, and it was just to try and keep that sort of habit because I was using it for the Miracle Morning stuff. And that doesn’t work with me at all. Because on a day-to-day basis, I’m not a person that needs to state gratitude daily, because for me it becomes a chore and then it almost becomes repetitious. And I just eventually find no value in it. So then I’m one that if I find no value, I immediately drop it. So even if it maybe has value in the long-term for those that still do it, good for you, but for me it doesn’t work.

So that’s been my recent experience. And then this past week I’ve been doing something a little different, and I’m still figuring it out, but I think that this is the process that I prefer.  

Crys: I have done different things at different times. For the most part, when I sit down to write it’s because I’m prompted by an experience.

When I was in high school, the reason I journaled the most was because I couldn’t process my thoughts. I couldn’t hold them together long enough to really think them through, unless I was putting them down on paper. I feel like that a lot about writing, unless I put it down, it doesn’t exist.

I’m not one of those people who builds up the entire story in their head, keeps it, and then writes it and everything just flies out. If it’s not in a computer or on a piece of paper, it never happened. And so for me, a lot of times it’s a processing function. I feel much more comfortable talking about things than I did when I was younger.

So I think a lot of my relationships have taken the place of my need for journaling, my immediate need. But the memory portion is so important for me, generally. I do often feel very self-conscious when I’m writing. And I’m being melodramatic, or whatever it is I’m being, and I’m like, what if somebody finds this someday?

And I’m like whatever. The chances are low that they’re going to be found by anyone, ever. Except for my kid. And then I’m sorry, you’ve just got to deal with your mother’s trauma when you’re 50 and I’m dead.

JP: So more recently, I found one because I collect journals then just leave them blank everywhere, I found one of my blank journals, no lines, and I think that this is the thing that I have been wanting. And so what I’ve started to do is I just carry it around with me. I think more recently I’m working on figuring out the purpose as to why I have this object with me.

And so the purpose is overall to improve my craft and writing by storing ideas, inspiration, and then just practicing and playing with little pieces in here. And so by having 100% blank page, I have no boxes I need to fill in, I have no check marks that I need to check because I hate all of that. That’s not for me. And so I feel like I can put whatever I want. I can doodle in it and I don’t feel awkward about doodling over lines. I don’t know. I very much need a full blank page to do something.

Crys: I’ve tried the blank pages, and what bothers me is when my writing starts tilting, that bothers the hell out of me. So what I like better than blank pages is graph pages.

JP: Ooh. Maybe.

Crys: Then I can be as structured as I want, or as lackadaisical as I want, I have the option.

JP: So my problem is that I’m a collector of journals, but 90% of the journals I collect are journals I’ve found for free.

Crys: Oh, nice.

JP: I don’t like paying for things because I’m one of those people. But yes, if I could find a graph journal, that would be amazing.

Crys: For those listening, I am showing JP my Leuchtturm1917 that I bought, and it has just the faintest dots, it’s not even full graphs, and it also has two bookmarks, and an index page.

So this is what the bullet journalers, bujo people, really like because you can do your pages. I really like the pages because again, no memory, I don’t know where everything is. This is my project notebook, so I keep track of things here, and I started this before I found notion so I’ve kept it going for a lot of notion things, the things that I would put in notion.

I have this constant back and forth between digital and touchable, real life, pen and paper. And I can never decide. So I literally have journal entries scattered over multiple books. I might have three books for the same year because it was just whichever one I found when I was feeling the things and needed to write it, which drives me nuts that they’re not organized. And then I will have random journal entries on notion, on 750 words, which I loved, and I did for a while, Google docs, and emails sometimes if I didn’t have anything else. It’s a mess and it drives me up the wall. And if I’m famous enough one day to require an archivist all my own, they’re going to have fun. I’ll never be that famous though. So that’s fine.

JP: I used Evernote when I went on my trip to Europe, but other than that, I use digital, but I’ll use an iPad and an Apple pencil. And I think it’s because when I’m journaling or reflecting, I’m a creature of pure chaos. I cannot write a single line thought. I will start down here, I’ll jump back to the beginning, I’ll jump to the bottom. And so my brain moves too chaotically to really do anything digital for journaling.

Now, when it comes to writing, of course, I’m gonna use Word.

Crys: I do find that I lean more and more towards pen and paper for actual journaling and reflection. There’s a different mind, body connection. You draw out different things. Like you said, you have that freedom, that chaos, and I think a lot of it is that my computer and my phone equal work for me.

So it’s very different mindset when I’m on them. So I’ll often pick up my phone, I have a Google doc that has been going on for years, it’s just story ideas. And if I have something that just pops into my head, or like something someone says, and I’m like, oh, I need to record that, it all goes in this one massive file that I read once or twice a year and just see if anything can be pulled in and used in my current work.

But yeah, I really enjoy the journaling. I find that when I do it regularly, my mind is calmer and clearer. And I think it does a lot, the same for me that meditation does, but in a different way .

JP: Do you schedule time to journal?

Crys: I don’t currently. I don’t do the Miracle Morning.

One of the things I found most difficult since having a child, and particularly since separating, is that because every day doesn’t have the same schedule, I rebel against having schedules in general. And I do fairly decent with my work time blocking, but unless it’s me scheduling something with someone, it’s all like up in the air and for grabs, and I’m the master of my universe, so I can say no. 

It’s frustrating to me that I can’t set a schedule and it work forever. Like it’ll work wonderfully for a month or two, and then it won’t. Maybe nothing will happen to change that, but it just won’t.

So I don’t know if I want to give the journaling more focus than just when I’m feeling something big, or I have a thought that I know I need to process, I go to the journal. I try to keep my journal really assessable and where I see it so that I do think about it, but right now I’m okay with the big emotions because otherwise I feel like I just write, today I did this, and today I did that, and that’s really boring. And I don’t want to read that in five years.

JP: Yeah, for my time, I cannot schedule this without feeling uncomfortable about where I’m scheduling it because right now my time block available for writing or for doing any sort of Miracle Morning or whatnot is in the morning before work.

And I want to dedicate that time to the projects that I’m working on. And so I originally had Miracle Morning during that time, however, that takes up half of that time. And for me, that just doesn’t work for me. So instead, what I’ve been doing with this journal this past week is I’ll have it right next to me while I work and I have it open, and any random thought that comes to mind I’ll just quickly jot it down.

But I’ve already filled up like seven pages in the past three days because of it. And so I feel like even though I don’t have a set time, I really like having it open and being consciously aware that it’s present. I’m sure that eventually it’s going to become so much a habit that I’m going to forget that it exists there, and then I’m not going to do it anymore because I’m like you where I love a process, and then all of a sudden, the process dissolves because I think we’re both creatures of chaos to say the least.

Crys: Yeah. I just realized that as we were talking about this chaos, that the particular kinds of thoughts that I’m putting into my current journal, because it’s nice and it’s leather outside, I do force myself into writing only and to like talking to myself because it is a Leuchtturm journal. But I know that does encourage me. I think I need to spend another  ridiculous amount, $25 or $30, on some more Leuchtturms because I do love this graph-ness, and I love being able to note pages for any particular big things, project-y things that I put.

And then one of the things that really attracted to me to the bullet journaling movement is that you have one book for all of the kinds of things you’re doing in the moment. So it might be to-do lists, it might be calendars, it might be whatever. And a lot of that I use online stuff for, like notion because that just works better for me. I don’t have to carry any specific item around with me to keep track of my to-do lists, but a lot of the free-flowing chaos thoughts, I think would be captured much better in a graph because I can’t do the blank.

The blank makes me think I need to draw on it, like I need to make drawings. And I haven’t practiced art in a really long time. And then I get really frustrated, and then it looks ugly, and I don’t want to look at it. Oh gosh. Brains are weird.

All right. What is our question for our dear listeners?

JP: I guess I’m curious what their journal practice is if they have one.

Crys: Excellent. If you would like to have access to these podcasts two days early, you can join us on writeaway.substack.com. The week that this episode comes out, you will also have access to two of our exclusive tarot episodes. And we’re using tarot as a planning and review tool for the entire year, a new experience for both of us. And it’s been a blast. Those episodes are short and to the point, and we are extra goofy, if you can imagine that, while delving into our witchy sides. We’ll link to where you can leave a comment and Substack in the notes below. See you next week.

JP: See you later.