Today's good Life Project Riff is a guest riff featuring a friend, Katie Dale, about who's the author of a book called let it a journey through journaling.
And not surprisingly, this riff is all about journaling and how it can be a really powerful tool that is accessible to pretty much anything to help you process, to help you be creative, to help you do a lot of really cool things in your life.
Turning it over to Katie for a conversation about journaling and life.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
So basically, a couple years ago, I was really in this unhappy place with my body and healing my eating disorder and feeling really uncomfortable all the time.
And I wandered into a bookstore and I had a gift card, and I saw across the way this really beautiful journal.
Nobody told me to start journaling.
Nobody told me that it would be helpful.
I just gravitated towards it.
I walked over to it and I picked it up off the shelf and took it to the park and just started writing.
And I remember it had different colored pages, so the first few pages were yellow and then orange and then blue.
And I remember I thought to myself, by the time I get to the blue pages, I'll be writing all really positive, happy things about myself and I'll be feeling completely different.
But right now, I'm going to just be real and authentic and let everything about how I'm feeling out of my head onto the page and just sort through it then.
And I did that.
And it felt so cathartic to get it out of my mind and see it all in front of me on the page.
And by the time I got to the blue pages, there were still negative thoughts that I had.
But I felt better just because I was processing them and because I was writing them.
And I would still go to the park and do that journaling every single day.
And back then, I thought everyone else could be themselves.
But I had to hide or change because I wasn't smart enough or cool enough or pretty enough.