write in my journal more often

...especially in times of stress or insomnia to empty the contents of one’s head out onto a page. It’s not a cure all, but it does help!

for quite a while, but I worte this morning at 4.30 am when I couldn’t sleep. I fell asleep afterwards – yay!

Been feeling a bit down lately and in a funk, and it’s been getting to me especially since I was in such great shape mentally and physically a couple of months ago. So I wrote in my journal and read back what I’d written a couple of months ago. I thought it had been down to my not following my diet (sugar and white flour addle my brain a bit) which was making me even more miserable with myself, but NO! It seems I had been mostly doing the food back then, but not always, the main thing was that I had figured out some goals on here and felt a real sense of purpose and direction and was getting out with friends, enjoying myself.
As a consequence, I felt a weight lift from me and I no longer feel as if it’s all my fault for not doing the food, I picked up on a couple of things I wanted to do (renovation project and discardia related) and DID THEM. I feel so much better now, and when I went to a friends house last night, I ate some bread and didn’t beat myself up about it.

Ahhh, that’s better. It’s hard work being down on yourself.

I have been so busy with DIY and too tired afterwards that I have really let this slip. I’m going to start again, at least once a week.

I have let a few of my goals go this week and been quite lax generally, but I did manage to write in my journal. I was too late to stay on the straight and narrow diet wise by working it all out (if it could have helped), but I worked out I need some time just to relax. So I stayed in bed ‘til all hours yesterday and read and it was great.

I woke up at 2.30 this morning and could not get back to sleep, my mind was all “WAKEY WAKEY!”, so I wrote down what was on my mind and lay there for another few hours, feeling like the cartoony pair of blinking eyes in total darkness. I then looked at my mobile phone and saw a deliciously gossipy text from my best mate. Definitely no hope of sleep after that.

Lesson learned? Writing stuff down doesn’t cure insomnia all the time. Also I am a gossip hound.

I have written, but not when I have felt really crabby. I have had a few times where I have tried to write in that mood and I just get even more frustrated when I don’t feel better for writing, even though I get pages and pages out. I guess it’s just one of those things, I can write myself out of certain moods but not others.

I ended up on a food binge (which I could stand to do as I need a bit more weight on me) and complaining about the world with my best mate on the phone. He was very funny and I got more out of that than I would writing 20 pages of journal.

Sometimes, I’ll just have to let myself be in a crap mood rather than trying to “fix myself” (which is probably what 43T is about for me) and feel bad about letting myself get that way. It’s hard to let myself be human and imperfect, but I want to be more open to that. That sounds so hippy-ish and lame (to my ears at least), but I am starting to learn how harsh I can be to myself. I already have a goal to stop caring what other people think of me, maybe I should add one to stop caring what I think of me haha!

I had originally imagined that I would be writing with a pen in a book. Yesterday I was adding to a private online journal related to the discardian goals I have here and by the end I realised I was journalling what I had on my mind anyway, so I guess typing it does count! I certainly felt a bit clearer about what I was doing and why.

Also I had the realisiation that 43T was originally a means to distract myself from a potential low spot but it’s now, in a short space of time, become a positive activity in and of itself and actually has far more wide reaching effects in my life than I could have imagined. Hurray for that!

I want to write to sort my head out and to find out when and why I feel stressed or emotional (or when I’m repressing it). Sometimes it’s hard to be honest about how you feel, even in the privacy of a journal and sometimes it’s hard to find a solution, but I think there is still value in writing it out. This goal could for me equally be called “explore my mind and be honest with myself”, but that’s so woolly and unspecific. Let this be a statement of intent that I want to journal my feelings and beliefs as truthfully as I can, and to try my best not to hide behind waffle, gossip and criticism.