TRANSCRIPT
Many years ago, over 10 years ago, I recorded a video on the subject of journaling and how valuable journaling can be to get to know the self, to build a relationship with the self, to explore our feelings, to do self-therapy, to heal. And for me, all those things are true. That’s been true for me now for more than 30 years.
But I’d like to talk about a different experience that I recently had that brought me back to something that I felt so many years ago. And that’s how awkward journaling used to be for me. And also part of why I bring this up now is when I talk about journaling as a primary tool of healing from childhood trauma, of doing self-therapy, as it were, people often comment. I hear this all the time: “I feel so awkward journaling. I feel so self-conscious. I feel so strange, and I just don’t like to journal. I don’t do it because it’s too much for me.” And I often don’t know how to respond.
Well, this recent experience I had brought me back to that experience again where I personally started experiencing feeling how awkward it was. What happened is several months ago, I was abroad. I was in Kyrgyzstan, and I was landlocked there. I couldn’t leave the country; the borders were all closed. So I was just waiting, and I was out in the countryside. I did not have my computer with me. All I had is a little tiny book that was literally this big that I could handwrite in. And I couldn’t write that freely because I knew if I wrote that freely, the book would be done. So I was really careful about how much I wrote.
I ended up feeling like I have a lot to say. I’m going through an extremely stressful time. It’s not normal for me to be landlocked in a country in Central Asia, so far from home. I was going through a lot of anxiety. It was the beginning of the pandemic, and I was like, “What’s going to happen to me?” Borders were closed all over the place. A lot was going on.
And what I found is that little handwritten journal that I had, that was this big with a tiny little pen, just wasn’t enough for me to express myself. I needed something else. And what I realized is that on my telephone, on my smartphone, there is a dictation feature. I’d never used it before. I’m not experienced with dictation, but I thought, “You know, why not try it?” I heard that Alice Miller, I heard this actually from her son Martin Miller, that when she wrote her first three books, or maybe her first four or five books even, she would go out in the forest and she would dictate them verbally onto a dictation device. And I thought, “You know, if she could write such brilliant work on a dictation device, I should be able to journal.”
So I was actually living near a forest. I could walk there and have privacy—privacy being a key thing for me for journaling. I can go out in the forest and give it a shot and try journaling into Notepad, one of the functions on my phone, using the dictation device. So I gave it a shot. I pressed the little button that allowed me to start dictating, and I started talking. I said the date, and then I said, “Dear journal,” and I started talking about my life. And it was so incredibly awkward. It was strange, and it brought me right back to more than 30 years before when I started journaling. I had those same feelings of incredible awkwardness, this incredible feeling of self-consciousness in a not good way.
And I thought, “God, I’ve been journaling for 30 years. I’ve been writing my feelings down in the most intense way, and now it’s so strange.” And I wonder, why was this going on? And I realized it was awkward because it was a new medium. I had never done it by dictation. Also, hearing my voice—I’m not used to hearing my voice as I journal, so it was a very different thing. And I realized this was a real opportunity for me to explore the awkwardness of journaling through this new medium.
And what I thought is, “Let me just keep trying it and see if I can work my way through it.” Because often I’ve suggested to people, “Listen, if you feel really, really awkward journaling, it’s because probably—this is my experience from all those years before, decades before—that it’s like you’re developing a new relationship with yourself. You’re looking at yourself in a new way. You’re self-reflecting in a new way, in a new medium. On paper, it’s like getting to know a brand new person, and this brand new person is you.” I think of people when they start dating. Often there’s this whole dance, this whole ritual that diminishes the inherent awkwardness in the process. And I think journaling is a lot like that. It’s like there’s an inherent awkwardness in getting to know new sides of yourself in this whole new way, in this ritual of journaling.
And so what I did is I tried taking my own advice, and no matter how awkward it was, I kept trying it, and I kept learning how to do it. And also, I made mistakes. I had to learn how to speak more clearly when I was dictating because sometimes the dictation wasn’t quite the best. So I had to really learn how to adjust myself in a different way to be able to journal. And I think that’s true when people write in a handwritten journal. It’s awkward. It’s not normal to develop a relationship with yourself on paper or through a computer. Sometimes you have to learn how to type faster to come up to speed to be able to express your thoughts quick enough.
So for me, what happened is as I became more comfortable with the dictation, as I became more comfortable at speaking clearly, enunciating my words clearly, also speaking the punctuation—for instance, if I was dictating, I would say, “Dear journal, comma, here I am in the forest in Kyrgyzstan, north of the capital Bishkek, period. I am feeling awkward journaling now, period. It’s a whole new medium for me to write this way, period.” So what I’m saying is I had to learn this whole new way of doing it. I also had to speak more slowly, period. I had to learn to remember when to put in commas, comma, so that when it came out in the written word, it would be legible, period. And then what I could do, comma, is cut and paste it right into my journal, period.
Well, learning to speak this way took a while. It wasn’t like it took a day or two. It actually took about a week before I became so comfortable that one day I was out in the forest and doing my dictation journal in the morning as I was walking amidst the trees. There were hawks and eagles around, and sometimes pheasants would come flying around, and wild horses running around, and sheep. And sometimes I would run into a shepherd speaking Russian. Oh, privilege on you!
Well, what I noticed is one day I was out there a week later, and I was just doing it comfortably. I had lost my self-consciousness. And what I realized is then it was just—I was in the flow. I had learned this medium of dictation, and suddenly I was comfortable, and I could just express my feelings at a pretty rapid pace while putting in punctuation, comma, so that it was very easy for me, almost like how it is for me now to speak in front of this camera.
Well, the difference with speaking in front of this camera is that it’s awkward in a whole different way because this really isn’t journaling, period. The reason that this is more awkward is because I know a lot of people, many people I don’t know, some people who may know me, many people who don’t know me could be listening to this. And it’s like, well, I have to use a whole other side of my brain to watch myself as I speak and to make sure that I’m really comfortable in sharing what I want. However, when I’m journaling into the dictation device, I just say whatever I want. I don’t care. Nobody’s going to read it. I can be completely free and unfettered.
Also, when I type my journal into the computer or when I hand write, also it’s just a free expression of me. Almost like I can just let my unconscious flow, no censorship whatsoever. But that’s also scary. Not so much for me now, because now in my life, it’s like my true self can really express itself freely in an uncensored way. I have very little to hide. I have basically nothing to hide from myself because I’ve been through it. I’ve worked through so many of my traumas, so many of my bad behaviors that resulted from my traumas. Perhaps all of it that I know myself, I really don’t have to feel afraid.
However, what I’ve seen in myself early on when I was journaling is the process of uncovering my true self, my true history, my true feelings, my true traumas, my bad behavior that resulted from what was done to me. The things that I replicated in the world, the traumas that I experienced and I acted out. It wasn’t easy to put that in paper. It was scary. It was uncomfortable. It brought up feelings. I felt ashamed. I felt frightened.
And also, what I started learning is the more that I journaled, the more that I got it down on paper, the less I was allowed to be in denial. And that was painful. What I started realizing is that this journaling thing is no joke. This is like putting an engine on a bicycle, and instead of going 20 miles an hour, suddenly you’re going 60 miles an hour. My life started flying forward.
I think that added to the awkwardness in some ways because it’s like I knew that if I kept doing this journaling, I was going to change. And in a way, I couldn’t stop the change. It was like the cat was now out of the bag, and the cat was not going to go back in the bag. And that was scary for me. It was like the more I journaled, the more I knew there would be consequences, and those consequences were going to be painful. It was not going to be easy.
The more that I experienced those consequences, the more that I realized I had to journal. I had to journal to save my life. I had to journal to save my sanity. I had to journal to restore my equilibrium. And the more that I restored my equilibrium inside myself, the more that I connected with my true self, the more I expressed my true self, and the more that there were consequences in my life.
My family system did not like this new me. My parents hated me in many ways. They were terrified of me. And if I was awkward with the new me, they were awkward around the new me also. And that’s dangerous. It’s like suddenly I didn’t fit into my family system anymore, and they reacted to that. They rebelled against me and they tried to put the screws on me harder and make me go back to being the old me. They didn’t like the new me. They said, “What happened to Daniel? We used to love Daniel. Where’s the Daniel that we love?” As if I’d become something alien and evil and bad.
The reality was they were projecting their alien selves, their false selves, their badness, their evilness even onto me because they couldn’t acknowledge it in themselves. They weren’t journaling honestly. Some of them, most of them, weren’t even journaling at all. And so I didn’t fit in. And yet somehow I realized that this journaling was my salvation. This was the thing that was going to allow me to be a self and love myself and be happy in the world, in my life, in my relationships.
Well, fast forward 30 years, 30 years of journaling, tens of thousands of pages. Fast forward to just a few months ago in the forests of Kyrgyzstan. Journaling into this device, though previously awkward, now became my best friend, my salvation, something that I leaned on, something that helped me, something that fed my soul.
And so my process of self-therapy, self-healing, returning to self-equilibrium, self-love, fighting for myself, using boundaries, being able to reflect, being able to use this journaling process to make sense of my life, make sense of my pain, make sense of my existential confusion, make sense of my interactional awkwardness in this new culture, this new world, new people I was living with, the craziness of the world, the stress of life, my loneliness, my grief, my fear. Yet again, my journal became my friend, my ally.