Write with reckless abandon.
I asked Adrianna Nine last week what she wanted people to know about journaling. She wrote (bold emphasis mine):
“Stop trying to make your journal pretty! I get it—you buy a gorgeous journal that you’re stoked about, and then your excitement turns into dread at the thought of ‘tainting’ it with your poor penmanship, crappy doodles, coffee splatters, whatever. But this book of blank pages is for you to work things out on, not for a museum or (despite what the rise in ‘junk journaling’ posts would suggest) the internet. It’ll be no use to you if you don’t write in it with reckless abandon. Kill the curator in your head! Take your favorite gel pen to that thing!”
I know the exact feeling of dread Adrianna’s talking about. There was a time when I couldn’t look at a blank page without feeling like I was looking down from the top of a roller coaster. Except it was even worse, because at the exact moment my stomach dropped, the critic in my head would come online and rip me to shreds for thinking I could ever write something worthwhile—and I believed it.
But now I know the truth: It’s all worthwhile.
Every misspelled word, every random thought and bad idea, every throwaway line that makes it into my journal is, in my friend pixie’s words, “a different kind of opportunity to practice loving myself through failure.” Every stray mark, coffee splatter, ink bleed, and crappy doodle is a chance to prove to myself it’s safe to make mistakes. Every bored, angry, grateful, uninspired, petty, or enlightened thing I write adds up to a better understanding of and relationship with myself. And to me, that’s the whole point.
So I write in my journal with reckless abandon. I put it all down on the page. I don’t worry too much about whether or not what I write is any good, and if I make a mistake, I don’t beat myself up about it; sometimes I keep writing, other times I’ll write “Oops. Oh well. What was I saying?” and move on. The critic in my head lets me. That’s how I know journaling works: The dread I used to feel has been replaced with love.
What would it take for you to be able to write with reckless abandon?
Comment and let me know.
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