Writing as Therapy

For Christmas 1955, my mom bought me a Five Year Diary.  It covered the years 1956, 57, 58, 59 and 1960.  The pages were predated so I had to write every day to avoid a blank space.  I still have the diary.  I soon converted to one year hand-written diaries and kept them for 1961 - 1964.  It got me into the practice of journaling and I still do it to this day, but now it’s in the form of this blog and a Word file.  I still have all of the handwritten diaries, but hope to put them into Word format so they can be easily shared with friends and family.

Many therapists recommend keeping a journal.  It is good therapy, a way to figure life out and record a history of your failures and successes, your sorrows and joys.  I wrote about the assassination of JFK, Martin Luther King’s March on Washington, the first moon landing, and other historical events as they happened.

I generally want my personal journal to be separate from my blog, which is public.  When it is public you may have a tendency to self-censor, and to get the most benefit from journaling you need to be uninhibited in expressing yourself.  You are writing for yourself, not an audience, and that can make all the difference.

There is another journal that I would like to start, in the form of an autobiography.  It may or may not be public, or maybe limited to specific friends and relatives.  I don’t want my most memorable life experiences to be lost when I die.  It too will be in an online blog format.

Why make these journals in the form of online blogs?  Because if online, you can access them from your iPad or iPhone and post when the inspiration strikes, no matter where you are.  I have missed many chances to write when dependent on a laptop, but I always have my iPhone with me.