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Have you ever tried journaling? Were you full of optimism and hope for how it would change you/ground you/fix you? Did those good intentions evaporate in less than three weeks?
I am the same. I read articles about the myriad benefits of journaling and thought it would be a great habit to build. I bought an elegant green Moleskine notebook with crisp empty pages and told myself it would help me stick to the writing habit. It never did. The notebook was swiftly hijacked for random scribbles and notes on video calls. What started as a sacred ritual quickly became a weekly chore that I dreaded. I gave up but it annoyed me that I couldn’t stick to it because I believe in the benefits of journaling. I still wanted those benefits but I found writing into a void felt pointless.
A letter arrived through my door from a younger version of me. It was totally unexpected. Reading the pages made me smile and laugh out loud. I was brought back to the day I wrote it with startling clarity and spent a good hour reminiscing about that time in my life. The letter came from a version of me ten years younger who had, under the guidance of a school teacher, written to the present me with some thoughts about his year and some dreams for the future. That teacher had held on to the letter for 10 years and then posted it to me. The concept isn’t new but it is brilliant. I recently learned of a cafe in Paris that offers a future mailing service to its patrons just like it. I wanted a version that didn’t require me to visit Paris constantly to achieve the same result. I wanted the benefits of writing to myself like a journal in such a way that I’d actually keep writing it and eventually read it again.
The obvious answer is email. It loses the joy and whimsy but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Future emailing services exist online but you don’t even need them. In Gmail you can schedule sending an email to yourself in the future in a few clicks. Perfect.
My non-journaling setup is to send myself an email in a year’s time about once a week. I write down some highlights of the week and what’s been weighing on my mind most. Mostly I keep it light and simple with random thoughts as they occur to me. It takes about 10 minutes a week total. I’m a few months into writing these emails so I’m yet to receive any back, but the anticipation is enough to keep me writing. I’m still getting most of the benefits of journaling without feeling like it’s a chore. The knowledge that I’ll actually reread it makes the writing worthwhile, and knowing that I’ll get a weekly time capsule of my thoughts and feelings from the past year will be like getting an email from a long lost friend which is about as far from spam as you can get.
I’m not someone who journals, but this feels like a cheat code and it’s working for me. I’m sorry to the Moleskine purists out there.