When I was a child, there was an old Godrej metal wardrobe in my house that would often pique my curiosity about its contents. It was kept locked and was opened only once a year during Diwali cleaning when we would be out in school. I never questioned its existence or the fact that it was locked. Maybe it had some priced ancestral antiques or my father’s savings. Sometimes, in moments of idle questioning, I would make a Bollywood-inspired guess that it housed my mother’s ornaments from her wedding kept safe for emergencies that a lower-middle-class family like ours might face anytime.
The wardrobe was one of those objects that had been there before I came into the world and had almost become a reverential entity by the time I arrived. But its existence, like the walls and the frames it stood against, could not be overlooked by a curious growing mind. That was when I queried my father about its contents.
He probably noticed my overwhelming interest and threw it open for my first-hand inquiry. The mouldering diaries it beheld took me entirely by surprise. Why did my family hide this junk behind a locked wardrobe?
Interestingly, the ink on those yellow, moist sheets of paper was still legible, and the diaries sang the tune of my family’s bygone golden era. Written in neat handwriting with a fountain pen, the letters were a testament to various family affairs — struggles, friendships, and collective decisions taken.
Today, research supports the benefits of journaling, and psychologists vouch for its mental health perks.
In a book titled Opening Up by Writing It Down, Pennebaker and Smyth survey the scientific history of expressive writing, its benefits, and how to make it work for you. They say that in the moments of feeling stuck, this powerful writing practice can get you out of the vortex of confusion and initiate a process of healing. Exploring the emotionally challenging events in your life and writing about them continuously for 20 minutes can give you an authentic cathartic experience. This venting exercise can help connect the dots of myriad feelings and bring closure to an unpleasant experience.
This is useful not only in expressive writing but also for a brilliant psychological exploration of our deepest thoughts, dreams, traumas, desires, and secrets, and it proves to be a great sleep inducer.
But unlike what many of us think, the beneficial aspect of journaling doesn’t end here. Reading what you have put on paper and tracing where your thoughts lead you to gives a peek into your personality – how confused, insecure, or solution-oriented you are. It helps you step back and create a distance between the chain of thoughts you have just unleashed on paper and a clear mind. And when this happens, the problem-solving appears more straightforward, and the targets seem more achievable.
Just like microplanning helps manage time better with an effective backup plan ready beforehand, tracing our thoughts and distancing them from us can help pluck out emotional weeds if we practise this process daily. We can then develop an effective backup to counter our negativity and teach ourselves calming and peace-out techniques.
I read about my family’s tenacious journey living in a shared, rented house in a busy locality of a tier-2 city and how they later formed a unique network of support and trust outside the circle of blood relatives. The withering pages I found in the musty wardrobe took me on a historic voyage of tracking my roots.
Mahatma Gandhi once said, “Happiness is attained when our thoughts, words, and actions align harmoniously.” By capturing our thoughts in a stream of consciousness and reinforcing our beliefs through journaling, we can move closer to achieving our goals, fostering harmonious relationships, and attaining mental peace.
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