Challenge within a challenge: Journaling

At the end of last year I did a 30 day minimalism challenge and one part of it was to journal for 20 minutes.  It was supposed to help organise my thoughts and de-stress. Now the last time I wrote in a journal or as Brits say a diary was back in uni. At school I did keep a little diary, but it wasn’t a dear diary thing, just the odd thought really. And it got quickly abandoned when I wrote the guys I fancied at school and my sisters got hold of the diary and told my parents at the dinner table who I fancied.

So my uni diary wasn't kept everyday but as anyone who’s gone to uni knows, you’re in a bubble where everything is magnified and dramas are even more dramatic then the real world. Following on my sisters reading the school attempt at a diary, I even made code names for guys I fancied, in case anyone read my diary.

Before I journalled for this challenge I read back some of diary. I’d actually read some of it back a couple of years ago with my friend Ro and it was very funny how seriously I took things, and how it really was the end of the world stuff. It was solid gold rubbish!

Not all of it was rubbish as the pages on the left were for thoughts and pages on the right were for quotes and song lyrics I liked, and they've stood the test of time.

The last time I wrote in the diary was 2009 I think, and the last passage was about me going for a job in Dubai. I even finished mid sentence, how dramatic! And the passage before was about my decision to end a long friendship; ‘Why be friends with someone who speaks with broken words.’ See really deep stuff, lol.

So what did I write in those 20 minutes of journaling? It was sort of a reflection piece really, what had happened in my life in 7 years and how nothing had gone the way I planned and of course there was my thoughts on guys as well. Really my diary entries hadn't changed at all.

I'm not going to keep the journaling up. I admire anybody that does; I've read a book of Richard E Grant’s diaries and they were a really interesting read. I think writing a diary had a good purpose in uni, but in the real world it’s just not for me right now.

Going back to my uni diary, at the end of it I wrote that the diary would be given to my friend Emma on the 17th September 2026. Yes when I'm 40, my friend Emma and I will be swapping our uni diaries…although everytime I remind her of this she says no straight away. Let’s see what happens in ten years!