Let Me Put U On: How journaling has shaped my life, and can shape yours, too
In our weekly series, “Let Me Put U On,” the UATL team shares the stories, places and experiences that continue to resonate long after we first discovered them. Some things are simply too good to keep to ourselves.
In the past four years, I have filled nearly 16 notebooks, of varying sizes and thicknesses, with my thoughts, of varying breadth and profundity.
I mainly practice stream-of-consciousness journaling, filling on average three pages a day with my internal dialogue as it comes to my mind — the anxieties, griefs, joys, mundanities and discursions alike. Each pen stroke is a suture to bring my soul back into my body.
So let me put you on to how journaling has shaped my life, provided me a way of stitching me back to this Earth, and what it can do for you, too.
My practice started in elementary school, a wide-ruled diary with just a dinky lock holding the occasional entry, only when I remembered to pick up my pompom-topped pen. In college and through my 20s, journaling sputtered inconsistently into my life, though every time I did it with some regularity, I felt my mind get tethered when it was floating too far away.
However, it is just in the past few years, particularly since 2024, that journaling has become a consistent part of my life.
When I was a junior in high school, my history teacher would assign us hundreds of key terms to define for every historical era or major world event we studied.
We could type things for our own notes, but to get credit on the assignment, the terms and their definitions had to be handwritten on note cards. The teacher said studies showed we would retain the information better if we wrote it down.
Sixteen-year-old Mirtha found that claim dubious, a doubt that has partly borne out. I don’t remember a single term or definition from the hours and hours I spent writing those note cards (and, despite this teacher having written my name down many times, she couldn’t remember how to pronounce it correctly for the two years I was her student).
Yet in adulthood, while I may not always remember something just because I wrote it down, my journals have become a repository where my thoughts are preserved and I can jog my memory of a certain time when I flip a notebook open. I have created an encyclopedia of myself.
Journaling preserves an internal life at a moment in time. Though not exhaustive, my journals are instructive just the same. Decades from now, when my life looks vastly different from yesterday or today or tomorrow, I will have a multi-volume Britannica set of Mirtha Donastorg that I can return to.
I typically journal in the mornings, in the space of time between waking and looking at my phone, though some days demand a nighttime journaling session.
My pen ink flows across the ivory sheets of my notebook like a river, the current of my thoughts pulling me forward.
From August 2024 to May 2026, I journaled every single day, no exception. Then this spring I got a cold and didn’t feel like writing. The streak broke and I felt oddly … fine. I had needed the year and a half of daily journaling at that time in my life. Now, I still journal consistently but on a more as-needed basis.
Both approaches are ok, as are other approaches that I haven’t outlined here. Journaling should fit into your life as well as record it. But it is also important to come to the page (or laptop screen or voice note, whatever medium resonates) and push through the discomforts that may get unearthed by simply being present with yourself for that moment in time.
There is no right way to write. Just begin.
