It’s always been hard for me to express myself.

It’s even been hard to know what I am feeling, or what I think.

When I started going out with my wife, every time I was not feeling good, she would ask me : What’s going on? How do you feel ? What’s the issue ?

And I would not know how to respond, making her feel like I didn’t want to talk to her.

I was really frustrating, not to know what you feel, where it is coming from, and be able to share with the person closest to you.

At this point, I was able to know I was feeling bad, but had not a lot more information about it…

How I started to change this

At around the same time, I started to meditate. It was really hard to get into, even more so as I started to meditate for way longer than I should have (I started with trying for 20 minutes every day when I should have started with maybe 10 seconds as I was way less disciplined back then).

But it did not really feel like it made any impact…

Maybe there were something I was not doing quite right, or I just was doing it enough (of course when you stop, you’re not doing it enough).

In anycase, I was not really resonating with it.

But then, I heard about journaling on questions in your life. I first heard about the 5-minutes journal, then about the Freedom Journal. While I did not buy any of those, I understood the concept and formed my own journaling templates.

I took upon writing the answer to a few questions every single day.

At first, it was :

What is your goal today?

What are you grateful for?

And I was able to keep at it (which was a huge win for me!)

And as it went on, I kept improving on it. I would say “Ok, this question does not seem to make sense anymore”, or “It seems I’ve been answering the same way to this question every single day”. I would either keep it or not if it made sense to repeat the answer.

I then increased the journaling to twice a day, once in the morning right after waking up, and once in the evening before getting to bed. I was writing in those very tiny notebooks, which are very nice as I can just limit or force myself to a single page each time.

One of my last days of journaling

That’s when it hit me. Especially after I started answering to two questions :

What was a win today ?

What was a ah-ha moment you had today ?

I started to really get this feeling people describe from meditation, of awareness of the world.

It was really small at first : Noticing a sign I never saw before, or that plants had been trimmed, on my way to work.

It started creeping in.

And with this, a better awareness of my feelings.

Why this awareness? Because I know have a better idea of what triggers the feeling.

And knowing what triggers it allowed me to speak about it and be able to finally put a name onto it.

It’s not over yet !

While this journaling helped me understand myself better, I have since started to write in other ways. I started affirmations-like writing, and free form writing.

While I am still not convinced about the first (but just because of the way I currently do it I think), the second has already proven, in the past few month, incredibly insightful.

I have found some new ideas from it, it helped me crystallize some new ones, and sometimes just relax and cool down.

But remember : Like all the tools I try to use to develop, it only gives direction to where to go. It won’t make you go there, but it will be a map that will point you the right way

You’ll still have to walk the walk, and it’s going to be hard.

And that’s what I’m trying to do now. Not just seeking a direction, but picking one, start going towards it, and use journaling (mainly) to stay on track, and see when I went off the road.

There is way more advantages to journaling than I let appear here. If you want to get more of the advantages of it, read this post from Benjamin P. Hardy, where you’ll get a really detailed view of what journaling can bring to you.