Journals - by Darylynn Starr Rank
February, 2005

“The world is horrid right straight through and so am I …every bit of me is tired. I’m old and ugly; stupid and ungracious…I want to grouch and sulk and rip and snort. I am a pail of milk that has gone sour.  Now, perhaps, having written it all down, the hatefulness will melt off to where the mist goes when the sun gets up…. Writing is a splendid sorter of your good and bad feelings, better even than paint.” 

That quote is by none other than Emily Carr, and perhaps the best statement I’ve ever read about one of the great reasons for writing in a journal. There are many other reasons, of course, other than sorting your emotions: keeping a record of your life, your work, your exercise, making observations on the universe, planning your future, and so on.

But it’s an odd concept that in this seemingly simple idea of keeping a journal, there are two major utterly separate reasons that make people want to do it, or alternately make people want to not do it.  

The first is that journal writing is usually just that. Writing. Now sitting down and writing is its own unique activity (no matter what you’re writing). For this category alone I think of the world as divided into three separate groups. 

The first group consists of those people who just plain love the idea of keeping a journal exactly because they love the idea of writing – practically anything. They want to write, they yearn to write, and a journal seems like a great place to do it. The second group consists of those who don’t keep a journal because they hate to write or simply have no interest in writing. So the idea of keeping a journal gets lost in the writing aspect of it. And finally, there’s the rest of us, who may like or love the idea of writing a journal, but won’t go near it because of the ‘fear’. 

It still astonishes me how many of us are afraid of the simple task of writing words down on paper. The reasons are legion and unceasingly fascinating. But the fear is there. Note that this isn’t at all the same as disliking writing, or being disinterested in it.

The second major focus or purpose of keeping a journal is for the exploration of one’s life: the past, the future, the feelings, the events, the thoughts, the memories. Self-understanding, self-analysis, consciousness, mindfulness of the art of living are often part of the goal. 

Now if you think a lot of us have ‘issues’ with the thought of writing, those issues “melt off into the mist” when compared with the ‘issues’ so many of us have about exploring our life, past, memories, and feelings: for analyzing ourselves. 

Though Socrates’ well-known saying, “The unexamined life is a life not worth living,” makes many of us want to explore that life, the scathing comments from others (even ourselves) are sometimes so damming that we turn our backs on it.  “Let it be,”  “Let it go,”  “Get over it” or, oh my gosh, “Stop navel gazing”. 

Our feelings are thus often terribly conflicted. No matter that we have a primal urge to explore ourselves, our lives, to understand. We often bury that feeling. How is it possible that the world’s most respected scientists devote their lives to understanding the physical universe, yet we feel silly when we try to understand our own? Imagine telling Einstein to “let it be”…

Keeping a journal. Who would have thought that such a simple idea was filled with so much joy and satisfaction and complexity and hesitation and fear?

Probably anyone who’s ever tried to keep one.

Take care all.

Darylynn Starr Rank (psychologist/writer) works part-time for Family Services of Greater Vancouver as a group facilitator. Her articles appear bi-weekly in The Record (New Westminster) and the Richmond Review.

Back to Article Index