Journaling as Self-Therapy
Only in recent years have I been compelled to write for self-therapy. Although I have been a technical writer for my entire career, from state administrative regulations, to technical operating procedures and manuals for an aerospace manufacturer and finally ordinances and resolutions for a small city, I never took the opportunity of writing for my benefit.
Over the last few years, I have changed that paradigm and have used journaling — not as a diary — but as a head-clearing process to help make sense of my world. Do I write every day? No, because forcing myself to do a daily entry would be too much like work for a retiree. I use journaling for the ‘making-sense-of-my-world’ perhaps as an odd combination of the work of Medium writers, Zat Rana and Kate Maria Pennell, who both have convincing if different reasons to use journaling.
If I am faced with an important decision, I will journal a continuum of outcomes and then rate them as probable events. If my friends present me with a complex set of events or exchanges, I write my private recollections and ‘complete-the-story’ in terms and language that I can understand and that are meaningful to me. Outsiders have little impact on me, psychically, but close friends and family often present me with dilemmas which bear on my life.
