💬 Friday Thread: Do you keep a running journal?

Whether it's pencil and paper, or 'in the cloud'

Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been reading an incredibly moving, thought-provoking new book by THM reader

Ruth Franklin

titled The Many Lives of Anne Frank, which tells the story of how the now-legendary diary she wrote while in hiding with her family in Amsterdam came to be, and its impact on the world ever since.

There’s a passage in the middle of Franklin’s book that especially caught my eye, a passage that describes Anne’s realization of how quickly she’d matured during those early years of the war, even though she wasn’t even fifteen years old yet:

Am I really still a silly little schoolgirl? she asked her diary before her fifteenth birthday. I have more experience than most; I have been through things that hardly anyone of my age has undergone.

As Franklin reads Anne’s writing, though, it becomes clear that the act of writing itself changed her:

It wasn’t just being in hiding that matured Anne so quickly; it was the act of using her diary to process the experience… For anyone experiencing distress or conflict, recording and interpreting it in a diary can be a way of asserting control over the experience.

And control it she did — or, at least to the best of her ability while living in the secret annex with seven other people for more than two years. I’m particularly struck by how Anne kept up her reading and schooling; as Ruth writes, she “had a mania for personal improvement” that didn’t dissipate, even in the midst of what she was going through.

All that writing “can have a particularly meaningful purpose,” Ruth adds: “it is a chrysalis from which the creative self emerges.” And this passage really struck me: “The very act of taking up the pen and writing down thoughts is an assertion of value.”

Something I think about, but which I’ve never actually done myself, is starting a running journal — you know, the kind with pen (or pencil) and paper, in which you write down how each run went, your distance, how you felt, and any thoughts or reflections you gleaned along the way.

Have you ever kept a running journal? (Or a journal of any kind?) Whether it’s digital or pen-and-paper, it doesn’t matter — how did you go about it, and what did you include? Do you still keep them, if you’ve kept them in the past?

You know I love hearing your stories — especially how we record and process our experiences. Let’s hear yours 😀 — Terrell