Mightier Than a Sword
Three years ago, I decided to start journaling. I spent days researching the best journaling apps, reading comparisons between writing with a pen or paper vs typing. I read all the “12 Reasons to Keep a Journal” and “5 Powerful Ways Journal Writing Changes Your Life” articles I could lay my hands on. After weeks of procrastination, I finally realized how the lazy-me was outsmarting the motivated-me. I kicked lazy-me in the butt, installed the free version of Penzu and just typed out whatever came to my mind.
It was barely 50 words! After weeks of planning and dreaming, the actual hard truth was that I choked at 50 words! But fortunately, I tried again. And again. Till gradually it became an outlet for my emotions. It especially became a huge catharsis for the negative ones. I would always feel better after penning down a journal entry. It was like cleaning a room, or in this case, cleaning the brain. Every time I journaled, it removed a lot of clutter and organized my thoughts. When I felt particularly stuck in a situation or couldn’t make up my mind on a decision, writing always helped. On paper, somehow the thoughts would start arranging themselves. The irrelevant would start fading away and the insights would start coming into focus.
What started as an exercise for better mental well-being, also became a valuable tool to be more productive in general. It started helping me structure the day or just feel in control when everything else was very chaotic. 2020 anyone?
It is amazing that we get to live in the information age. Learning is breaking all kinds of boundaries and all of us truly have opportunities to transcend the circumstances of our birth. We are privileged enough to get exposure to people from different culture and leading different lifestyles. There is a whole platter to choose from — tweets, social media, streaming television, documentaries, podcasts and what not. But, easy there! It could become that we are choosing our own poison.
The major downside to this era of “mindfillness” is that we get into a habit of consuming content. It’s as if all of us are attached to IVs that are constantly pumping in information. Our ability to express is decreasing and so is our ability to think for ourselves. Gross as it may sound, it’s as if someone is chewing our food for us and we just have to swallow.
It took a year of writing journal entries intermittently before I noticed that they were getting longer. From 50–100 words initially, the entries had grown to 400–500 words at a stretch. The writing had also begun to flow more naturally. I read about the stream of consciousness and that resonated. I could see it in action.
The reason for evil in this world is that people are not able to tell their stories. — Carl Jung
But the biggest benefit of journaling was gaining control of my narrative. As I’ve written before, trauma is a human condition in this age. We are all leading very stressful lives and stress has a tendency to accumulate. It chips away at our mental well-being and over time becomes a larger than life adversary. Journaling lets us write about difficult experiences and emotions in a safe environment and we can go from being a victim to taking back control.
In fact, this is what traditional talk therapy does. The therapist encourages you to talk about the painful incidents in as much detail as you can. When you do that in a safe environment and with the support of a sympathetic individual, it lets you take back the control of your story.
A pen is not just mightier than a sword, a pen can actually heal more than many medicines.
One day while writing in a notebook, I just lost track of time and after filling pages after pages, I saw that I had been writing for over an hour. Not just that, the writing was very lyrical and pretty. The last few lines were actually a poem. Without thinking about it, without planning to, I had penned down a poem. Me? Miss “I-don’t-have-a-creative-bone-in-my-body"?? Not everyone has to become Mark Twain but getting better at something you love is it’s own reward.
If you search for the benefits of writing, I’m sure someone or the other will mention how it synchronizes the left and right parts of the brain, promotes neurogenesis and what not. But do we really care about all that?
As for me, I’m enjoying the process. It’s helping to organize my thoughts, it’s making me more creative and thoughtful, and to top it all, it’s extremely therapeutic. With a pen in my hand I feel powerful. That’s reason enough.
