Importance of journaling

Last ten days have been a bit gloomy for me.

I am slow­ly feel­ing bet­ter. What has helped me is putting my thoughts down in a 960-word essay on what is both­er­ing me and how I intend to deal with it.

I wrote my post in the morn­ing. Inci­den­tal­ly, Scott Berkun, one of the writ­ers I admire, has tweet­ed this in the after­noon.

In my case, I do not want to for­get any­thing but I just want to pen down my thoughts and clear my mind. I am so proud of what I wrote. So proud that I read it count­less times since yes­ter­day. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the post is too per­son­al and is for my ref­er­ence. So I pub­lished it pri­vate­ly. It will ever be read by only two peo­ple besides me. It has remind­ed me the impor­tance of jour­nal­ing and its ben­e­fits.

It is immense­ly sat­is­fy­ing, once in a while, to go back in time and read my past thoughts. I derive a great plea­sure from it.

Here are the places I jour­nal my life.

This blog — I write per­son­al top­ics that I am com­fort­able shar­ing pub­licly. I try to avoid neg­a­tive top­ics as much as pos­si­ble.

Day­one app — Per­son­al top­ics that I am not com­fort­able to share pub­licly. May con­tain some neg­a­tive thoughts and con­cerns I have.

iPhone cam­era roll — My phone’s cam­era roll tells me the visu­al sto­ry of my life. I upload the pho­tos reg­u­lar­ly to three places: Flickr, Google Pho­tos, and OneDrive.

Twit­ter — My tweets are a way to cap­ture my short-form thoughts. They are cheeky some­times. Some of them sound preachy but I am real­ly talk­ing to myself, pub­licly.

Face­book — I share per­son­al pho­tos for myself and my extend­ed fam­i­ly.

My Flickr feed — I most­ly put the food pho­tos on Flickr. While it may look like I am show­ing off the excit­ing dish­es I am hav­ing, each pho­to reminds me of the peo­ple I shared the table with and the good and bad times we had.

Yahoo Mail Inbox — I have all the text chats and text mes­sages we exchanged dur­ing our courtship. Text chat has a spe­cial place in my life.