My Daily Journaling Practice
I’ve been keeping a journal mostly regularly since I was 9 or so. For the vast majority of that time, it was not every day, but I’d write when major events in my life happened, or when I got particularly frustrated with my parents or sister (heh). Like many kids, I was pretty obsessed with Anne Frank’s diary, and had to remind myself that my diary wasn’t being published, no one was seeing it, I wasn’t sharing it with anyone. (I also didn’t have snooping siblings, so I didn’t have to hide it too hard.)
I have many years of physical notebooks that served as my journal. I haven’t revisited them in the many years since, but I have them available to me should I choose to do that. As the digital age progressed, I made vague attempts at keeping a journal in Word documents and have a few scattered journal entries in old digital files that I really should do something with. For over a year, I kept a journal digitally in Evernote, creating a separate notebook for those entries, and every month had its own note page, carefully dated.
A friend happened to post on Instagram that she was using Day One for her journal, and had just gotten a second bound journal of a year’s worth of entries through that service. For whatever reason, that’s what clicked for me — an app that was a digital-first journal, but you had the option of collating the entries into a physical book that you could…
