For the last five years I have kept a journaling practice. It does a lot for me.
I have the old ADHD wiring. If something is left undone, my brain runs on autopilot at night. And a morning without a touch point can descend into chaos fast.
So I journal twice a day. Roughly.
Lately, for about the last year, I have been battling what I lovingly call the quit monkey. It is the voice in my head crying, "I am bored!" It screams that this does not work, that nothing comes of it, that I could turn on a lecture and get the same result. I cannot. But that is what it says.
My business is challenging right now. I am launching new things. I am getting my book ready to come. That last one has been terrifying and liberating in equal measure. Without the check-ins I used to hate, I will tell you plainly, I would be adrift.
So how do I fix this? How do I make peace with a practice that every scholar and magnate in history has called vital, and that still bores me to f***ing tears?
I learned to do it better.
Through social media I bumped into a man, and in one conversation he helped me clear up three things.
First, my journaling was all surface. What am I doing, what happened today, what are my goals. It was me writing the same entry 365 days in a row. Repetition is fine, but ugh.
Second, I never solved anything. I wrote about my problems constantly, but the solutions never showed up.
Third, it never felt like I was doing anything. It was the one moment of my day that sat in stasis. A generic to-do. I literally wrote it on my to-do list.
Then he showed me how to break the pattern. It is simple.
- Get out of my head and into my emotions.
- Take a brief moment of quiet.
- Listen for the answer.
- Execute.
What has happened since is a revelation. Journaling now feels like time with an old friend. I am no longer stuck in the cage of what merely happened to me that day. I write about plans, about what I want, about how I want to show up in the world. And after each session the quit monkey goes quiet, and something steadier tells me I am enough.
I want to stress that this shift came from us just talking about it. I have not even taken his class yet.
It reminded me again that even when you know how to do something, someone else knows how to do it better. I am glad he showed me, even briefly, how to make the practice more enjoyable and more useful.