Journal Guilt

Why We Really Write

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Lately I’ve been feeling what I call “journal guilt.” As I closed out my last journal, I noticed the pages between the habit trackers, health trackers, analog calendars, and action lists were leaner than in the past.

Why is that?

For decades, journaling has been part of my daily practice. Committed to Julia Cameron’s gold standard Morning Pages (not always the suggested three page release), journaling was just something I did with my morning coffee. It is where I process life’s overwhelm. I look for behavior patterns to make positive changes. I explore ideas. I stay connected to the woman I am and work on who I want to be.

I write about what is going on in my life. Vacations. What is happening with our children and grandchildren. There has been little of that in the last six months. I feel sad and surprised, and guilty. Like I have lost a part of my life. I look at my journal as if I have broken a promise.

Then I ran into Tanya Lynch’s post “How to Start a Journaling Habit” HERE (1). Sometimes we have to go back to ‌basics. Sometimes we can’t live up to Julia Cameron every day. Sometimes all we can offer is one word “OVERWHELMED.” And that is enough.

Journaling is at the foundation of my creativity. This form of writing is nourishment that gives energy to everything else I write. It is where I notice what is happening around me and is what launched me into writing on Substack. There are many days when I will stop mid-entry with an idea for a blog. Substack writings gave me the confidence that I could write books. Daily journaling took a young girl’s dream and made it a reality-publishing books. It would be foolish to let go of the foundation.

Most writers I know keep a journal, a place for private reflection, but often this becomes a wellspring of ideas that go out into the marketplace. So how do we balance this necessity to reflect with this desire to publish?

To write is to pay close attention, whether it is a personal journal entry, a blog post, a magazine article, a book, or any of the many ways to get work into the public square today. My journaling practice has been a tool to hone my observational skills, which are now showing up in my public writing. Maybe I am confusing the tool with the purpose. The purpose was never the journal itself. It was the teaching experience. How to reflect. How to become curious and make meaning from experience.

Maybe there is a season for everything. Some seasons call for personal writing. Other seasons are for writing that reaches beyond the private page. My journal is always there. I still open it every day to record exercise and migraine attacks. Salt intake and how much time I’ve spent writing.

Today I will write that “growth means letting my journaling practice evolve, not measuring it against some earlier version.” Or maybe I will just write “EVOLVING.”

Love, Alice

1. Tanya Lynch brings in Anais Nin to give depth to the question of why we write, exquisitely expressed and reproduced below:

We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely…When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing. – Anais Nin (The Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 5 (1947-1955))

** I am thrilled to share the publication of my first book, Mabel and her Bright, Noisy, Prickly, Dizzy Migraine, which will be out at the end of September 2026. Details to follow where you can pick up your copy to support the conversation around invisible illness. Also see my website Alice's Website

**To learn more about me as a writer, and how I came to write this book, listen to my interview on Twice Five Miles Radio with James Nave Writing as Medicine. You can find Nave on Substack James Nave.

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