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Do you journal?
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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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I do. Not as often as I'd like sometimes. I treat it like I'm writing a letter to someone who doesn't exist. It helps me vent whatever I've been struggling with, or take some pride in the things that have gone right for me. I feel weird talking about stuff like that with friends and family, so this gives me an empty void to talk into without worry of judgement. I started doing it a while ago after going through some therapy and it's been the one thing that's actually helped post-therapy. My journal lives in a Linux partition on my main PC through an encrypted file that has a different password than any I use elsewhere. No one that has access to that computer can navigate how I have Linux set up, nor would they know how to go through the terminal to decrypt the file. These protections are in place to ensure that no one sees anything they shouldn't. If you do journal, I recommend taking similar precautions, but I'm also not mentally well and paranoid to boot, so grain of salt and all that
I have always found it difficult journaling. Whenever I tried to journal my pain it never became lighter. I have also been scared of any of my writing being accessible to anyone, i like your idea and will try it.
I hope it works out for you! If you're Linux based, I recommend jrnl. It's a lightweight terminal tool that handles logging and accessing your journal entries and has an encryption option built in. Through the config, you can use whatever text editor you want. I'm using vim because I hate myself!
As for the experience, it really takes some time to get used to. When I first started, I found myself "faking it" for lack of a better word. I wasn't actually writing what I was feeling, I was writing what I'd want someone else to read if they found it. After a while, that became less of the norm and I started treating it like a pen pal that I never heard back from. It lets me kind of put things into perspective and really dig into why I think I'm feeling what I'm feeling. Writing that you're mad won't make you not mad. Writing what made you mad, why you think it bothers you, etc. Won't really make you not mad. The latter helps you understand what's going on better and then you can work on regulating yourself from there
I do use linux. Will try jrnl out.
I can relate so much to writing something thinking how others will perceive it and it never helped much.
It'll take some time, but the more you do it, the more comfortable it gets. At first it's going to feel kind of cringey. That feeling fades with time. Just gotta keep in mind that you're writing for you, not for anyone else. Also jrnl is available through the aur and GitHub. I don't currently run anything other than garuda so I can't speak for how available it is on Debian/fedora/etc