good journal/bad journal
I have a good journal and a bad journal, but this was not my intention.
I started journaling seriously about two years ago and have since completed over 10 journals, most of which are chaotic, messy, emotional, and wholly unabashed. I stopped writing that way in June 2024 when I forwent artsy chaos for a more structured style. I felt it was time, now that I'd done some healing, to try a diary.
As much as I enjoy cutely placed stickers and linear storytelling, it wasn't long before I felt myself constricted by the aesthetic of my diary. Certain feelings, especially complex and heavy feelings, didn't feel right next to glittery stickers or rabbits and bows. So, I moved those thoughts into a smaller separate journal. Nearly every day since June, I've written in the diary a page-long log of everything I did that day with sticker deco, and then when I need to vent or dive into a feeling more deeply, I'll go on for as long as I need in the smaller journal. The system works as intended, but after working through some rough patches mentally since I started it, the smaller journal has become somewhat of a bad omen. When I write in it, something always has to be wrong. If everything was fine, it would fit on a page in my diary. Except that wasn't always the case, sometimes I'd go on for pages about how happy I was, but that didn't matter. I felt I had tainted it, though this was hardly rational.
After all, I started journaling two years ago as a way of expelling all the "bad" from my brain onto paper, but I think I became so scared of a backslide, so scared of ruining the pretty paper, that all complex emotion took on a doomsday quality. I was so frantic to be healed I forgot what healing looks like. It's messy. It's pages upon pages of doing better and worse and better again. It's thinking the world is ending then realizing maybe you just needed to go outside. It's not a good journal or a bad journal, it just is.
Whether it's a sticker kind of day or a venting kind of day, my journals will be there for me, though I should probably stop stereotyping them like this.