Think about the last time you felt like your life exploded. Maybe you found out you’d lost your job, faced the final breakdown of a relationship, or got betrayed after someone you trusted shared your deepest secret. It’s not a pleasant sensation.
Fortunately, you can use tools to diffuse the flames and survive the experience; one of the best is journaling.
Let’s take a look at what journaling is and how it can help us navigate difficulties.
What is Journaling?
In the most literal sense, journaling is just about putting pen to paper and contemplating what’s going on in your life and how you feel.
Yet it’s also much more than that.
Writing something down can help you deal with powerful emotions and complex life events, allowing you to transfer your negative feelings to the page. This way, we can make sense of our thoughts and behaviors and move forward in our life.
How to Journal
There’s not a single right way to journal. There are bullet journals, stream-of-thought journals, commonplace books, and probably hundreds of other variants.
Depending on your personal preferences or what you’re going through, you might want to focus on different aspects (such as introspection vs. working toward a specific goal).
However, there are a few common threads about how you should approach the task:
- Be honest about how you really feel.
- Dig deep — go beyond how you think and ask yourself why you feel that way.
- Be consistent and make journaling part of your routine.
- Allow for flexibility — including a poem or a drawing might feel right one day.
What a Fiction Book Can Tell Us About Journaling
Hearing about how helpful journaling can be and how to do it in theoretical terms will only take you so far. Stories, even fictional ones, can help us connect with the concept of journaling.
In “Someone Like Me” by author Marian L. Thomas, the protagonist Mýa Day struggles to cope after losing her mother; this leads to her making one wrong decision after another. Talk about your life turning to lava.
With the help of Jack and Mary Tanner, a couple that understands from experience how a troubled past can prevent someone from having a better life, Mýa is introduced to journaling.
Mýa uses journaling to come to terms with her past and make a fresh start with her own insecurities.
Someone Like Me is available for purchase from Amazon for Kindle, or Target, Walmart, and Barnes and Noble for paperback.
Journaling — Because Life Can Be Like Lava
Is journaling the right option for you? If you feel like your life has turned to lava and you need a way to deal with the explosions of life, by all means, give journaling a try.
About Marian L. Thomas:
Born in Illinois, Marian L. Thomas wouldn’t say that her first career choice was writing novels. She saw herself working as a journalist for a local newspaper. Marian’s writing path took a detour after writing her first novel. Now, she can’t imagine not crafting stories for women that bring characters to life—characters who face natural obstacles, cross complex barriers to find love, and discover all the beautiful possibilities that life can offer.
Marian has penned six women’s fiction novels, including her latest, Someone Like Me, that courageously touches on race, black hair, and self-love issues.
Marian and her husband currently live in a suburb of Atlanta. She enjoys watching movies with a historical flair and believes that popcorn should be a vegetable.
To learn more about Marian, visit her website at https://marianlthomas.com
