Dear Diary

I don’t think it’s any secret that I’ve suffered from mental health issues throughout my life. I don’t even think it started when Sue passed away either. I think there were issues before then.

As you may or may not have noticed, I don’t really blog anymore. I certainly don’t blog all that much about my thoughts or feelings. I don’t know whether or not it’s because I’ve matured and seem to internalise things more or whether or not it’s opinion that some things shouldn’t be shared and the world shouldn’t know about my problems.

Either way, I’m missing some sort of an outlet at the moment. Lockdown and constant working from home isn’t helping with that either.

I’ve heard a lot about journaling. I’ve got friends that have done it for years. There’s even specialist forms of journaling called bullet journals where there’s special codes and notation for things.

I’m old fashioned, I don’t like bullet points and I tend to just stream out paragraphs whenever I need to.

I’m also not big on hand writing. I need to type. I can type a whole page out faster than I could handwrite a paragraph. And the resulting text would be legible too. Which is a bonus.

Tonight I’ve taken a look at ‘Day One’. It’s digital, its apple centric and has an app for my MacBook, my iPad, and my iPhone. I can have multiple journals - so I can have one about work stuff, one about thoughts, one that I might stick blog posts into prior to posting them.

Looks pretty good, has templates for daily stuff. 5 min journals, standups for work, task lists and lots of other things. I think it would really help me.

So I’ve started to journal.

It’s not like it’s going to affect the frequency of posts here. Then again it might result in more posts coming here. I used to write a lot. I don’t write at all anymore.

I’m looking forward to the organisation that with any luck, this new habit (once formed) will bring to my life.

I think if I start off each day with task lists, do the work standup prep and also do the 5 min catch up day and night, I might end up with a more organised, streamlined brain.

And it doesn’t matter if its fit for consumption by other humans. It doesn’t even matter if I read through it ever again.

It might help me to understand my highs and lows a little more.