My journaling "origin story."
I often ask my mother questions about her life. We grew up entirely different, so my curious mind always hungered to find out about her growing up in Brazil.
When I was little, the things she would tell me seemed to come easy off her brain. Maybe this was because she herself was also younger and with a fresher mind. Now that I am older and my curiosities of the world have become complex, most of the time my mother can't answer the questions I ask anymore. She will often say, “Maybe if I wrote things down like you do, I’d be able to answer that question.”
My passion for journaling sparked from the memories my mother used to tell me. Since I've been journaling for a little over ten years now, I get really excited to answer questions like, “Why did you do this the way you did? What did you think in that very moment? How did you come to the place you are?”
I didn’t always journal, though, so I’m sure there are chunks of memories that can’t be reached even if I dug far into the depths of my mind. But for a long time, I relied on writing as my main form of expression. I write what I see, what I think, what I feel. I always want to be able to answer questions about life that my mother sometimes wasn’t able to.
It was not always this way, though.
I began writing early in life, but my relationship with it was rocky and complex. As young as three years old, I never got the hang of forming letters and assigning meaning to these strange symbols. In the first grade, I dreaded being called on for group reading because I wasn’t good at reciting off a page. I only knew the sounds that letters were supposed to make, but my brain couldn’t put it together into words. When it came to writing, I was worse: my handwriting was unintelligible, my hands worked dreadfully slow, and although I had a big imagination, I was very quiet, never knowing what to even write about. My older sister often did my writing practice homework with her beautiful 2nd-grade handwriting.
I can owe my slow grasp on reading and writing to being raised with a mixture of my parents’ native tongue and broken English. For a long time it just that:"Portuglish"––a mixture of Portuguese and English––and playing with my sister all day long. It didn’t really matter that I never engaged in early-learning activities such as educational television, alphabet blocks, letter fridge magnets, or children’s books. We had each other, and that was all we needed.
Not being able to read or write like the other children began to have an impact on me in the 1st grade. Kids can be really mean; they notice your differences and don’t understand them, so they point them out in a way that patronizes you.
My mother couldn't stand my incompetence at writing, too. One day when she had to sign off my homework, she stared blankly at the page before ripping it up and forcing me to do it all over again. Though I cried with shame, she assigned me to write and rewrite my homework daily, countless times, for hours upon hours, until my handwriting became not only legible, but beautiful. I could even write in cursive.
The 2nd grade came with a lot of frustrated motivation, and I quickly became one of the top readers in my class, and was even exceptional at math too. Though I became good at reading, writing, and other academics, I didn’t enjoy such activities. In fact, I viewed them in a worse light than I ever did before––I viewed writing as a chore.
Unfortunately, my cockiness got me accepted into a gifted and talented school in the 3rd grade, which my mother forced me to transfer to. I say forced because I didn’t want to go. The environment was competitive, with a bunch of kids that constantly compared themselves and tried to outrank each other. Everyone was mean, and worst of all, way beyond my level. If possible, I hated school more than ever with a disdain so deep that I simply stopped trying to be good at reading and writing. After all, my competitive fire was gone, so I had no reason to like these activities anymore.
This all changed in the 4th grade. During free time I would often help the librarian put away books onto the shelves and keep records, a better activity than feeling left out on the playground. I noticed one day a book with pictures, but it was unlike the children’s books of my early youth. The drawings were fun but sophisticated, in black and white, and word bubbles would appear above the characters’ mouths when they spoke. With a vivid image of the story being told, a small flame started flickering in my chest again—not of competitiveness—but this time of excitement.
Pictured: The book series that started it all.
From thereon out I always had a comic book in hand. I read during free time, during lunch, and even on the bus ride home. During classroom time when I was not allowed to have distractions, I learned how to make my own comics. I drew my favorite characters, wrote up scenarios, and carefully formed stories with elaborate dialogue, onomatopoeia, and action descriptions. Pictures soon became overpowered by words, and soon enough I was writing full-length stories. I found an escape writing these stories. You could find my ‘work’ anywhere from my school notes to the back of my testing papers.
My mother eventually took notice of my newfound hobby, and one day, she gifted me a large pink quilted book with an abundance of empty pages. It looked nothing like those 5-star or composition notebooks we bought yearly as school supplies. Instead, that pink quilted notebook was perhaps the nicest notebook I’d ever seen at the time. Though I already knew the answer, I questioned why she bought such a nice notebook. She said: “Just write anything that you see, anything that you feel. You’ll thank yourself when you’re older.”
I took those weighty words to heart and to this day, I write almost daily.
The power of journaling.
Because I've journaled almost every day since the 4th grade, I have a very extensive record of my thoughts, growth stages, and mental states for the past ten years. In other words, if I wanted to conduct some elaborate psychoanalytic study of myself . . . I very well could. After all, I've got the records to do it!
I like to think of such a record as an important piece of history. Well, my 8th grade crush, first kiss, or day-to-day frustrations may not necessarily be of importance to you, but the fact that I wrote it down means that as long as someone reads it, they'll have some sort of idea what it was like to grow up at the start of the digital age in the new millennium, meaning it's important to somebody. I may even answer questions to the next generation if I'm not around anymore.
But that's not the only reason why I journal.
Really, the true power of journaling comes with many benefits for the brain. Studies show that journaling actually helps improve your mood and quality of life. Self-talk allows you to track your day-to-day moods and learn ways you can change or improve. It can also help with any sort of negativity you may feel and serve as a great way for you to vent out any of those emotions you may have.
For this reason, I've always turned to journaling at both my best and worst moments. I subconsciously treat my journal as a friend that I can release my emotions to, and it's helped me tremendously with my mental health throughout the years.
And hey, it's pretty cool to know what my exact thoughts were at any point in time!
If you've never journaled before, I highly recommend you to look into starting. Journaling may even be an excellent way to freshen up your mind and prepare for your next writing project! Stick around for the next blog post, where I'll go more into depth about various ways you can get into journaling.
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