Escape reality through journaling

Staring at a blank page. Words and sentences in jumbles running through your head. You can’t make sense of anything that you want to write because you don’t understand how to put all of your feelings, all of these built up emotions onto a page.

Here’s what you do: put the pen on the paper and write down the first word that comes to your mind. It could be “peanut” or “cloud”, it could be absolutely anything. You just need that first word on the page and then it all flows from there. Once the page isn’t blank anymore, the intimidation disappears. The pressure lifts and you are free.

Journaling is literally writing down anything you want to write down on a page. It doesn’t even have to be words, it could be pictures, it could be whatever you want it to be. Journaling is getting everything you feel onto a page. The first thing that I did when I began journaling is I wrote my favorite quotes. I would wake up in the morning and find a quote that I think fit the way I felt that day and I wrote it down. I drew patterns and stuff all around it and I made it my own.

Then, I wrote the quote and then wrote how it made me feel. Did it make me feel sad? Did it make me feel understood? Eventually, the part of the page that was about my feelings got longer, and the quotes got shorter, and I started just writing about my feelings. I no longer needed a quote to put my feelings into words for me.

Knowing that you are the only one who would ever see that page makes it easier to put yourself out there. Feelings are a complicated thing. I was always a closed book and quite literally used a closed book to be that way. My thoughts were my own and keeping them all in one place allows for review and reflection of growth.

In order to be able to journal, you can’t question it or allow it to intimidate you. You just have to put the pen on the page and see what happens from there. Don’t pressure yourself to write anything specific or write something that you don’t actually mean just because you don’t want to admit that you are feeling the way that you are.

The best way of doing it is just to simply do it.

For now, I'll get you started. Here’s a list of things you need to journal:

-A 5x7 notebook

- Colored pens

- A cup of coffee or tea

- Fuzzy socks

- A comfy chair or couch

- An open mind