Getting Journalling again

Recently I have gone back to journalling, or diarising, in a stream of consciousness way. This isn’t something that I have done for maybe years. Once it had to be written, longhand, on paper with pen in hand. I always thought that it would need to be like this if you were ‘properly’ journalling, and there is still room for that. I had discovered some diaries from younger years and it struck me how there were so many words, pages of them, about nothing really except what was going on for me at the time - and I can’t even remember most of it. I have started doing journal typing now, partly because paper is so expensive and sometimes I have a lot of say and it felt like there would not be enough paper (that I could reasonably afford anyway). So, the screen comes into play, and I don’t really like it, but needs must.

There is always something about words and putting words down that I find makes sense of things, or tries to make sense of things. I see the words written down and I am still going, still tying, because although I find art or craft soothing, it is by words that I make sense of things. It is words that I come back to, either my own, or other peoples’ to try and make serious sense of life or things that are happening around me, and this goes for internal things or things out there in the world. I can come to the page, or the keyboard, with my head full of confusion and turmoil and after a little while by making letters appear then things start to order themselves a bit more. The letters just appear and sometimes they don’t seem to make any sense at first. They seem to come of their own accord, and if I am listening properly, they tell a story that I wasn’t expecting, or something that I was expecting but not the way that I thought it was going to speak.

The words straighten out, like a long role that has been wrapped into knots, and then it starts to straighten out, bit by bit. The knots untie and they seem to know the words they want, because they appear and make themselves into lines. Sometimes the lines repeat and repeat until they are understood, a bit like people in therapy when they tell the same stories over and over until they can finally make sense of them; they need to be heard in a certain way or seen in a certain way. The lines retell their stories until finally they are seen and heard, and it is only then that they can move on to the next story, or the next thing that wants to speak.

Sometimes I find writing down words to be an alchemical process, although it isn’t always this way. Something else comes out of what you think is going in, and it takes on a life of its own. I think of those authors who say that they are just writing down what they are told, they don’t really know the stories themselves but they have to write it to find out. Perhaps there’s an element of that in all words that are written down?

How do you find your process of journalling?