The Benefits and Power of Journaling
How journaling changed my relationship with my kid sister, based on an idea you might want to try. Plus inspiring articles to help you journal with purpose.
When I was in my early forties, I read a novel that prompted an idea that proved to be life-changing for me and my ten-year-younger sister, Mollie, who lived in California. In the novel, a woman has a good friend she can’t be with often. The friend suggests they should keep daily journals of their activities, observations, secret thoughts, and so forth. The friend believes that all lives are interesting when studied as a whole, even if the daily events seem insignificant at the time.
As a writer and journalist since childhood, I knew the benefits of documenting my life. This novel suddenly made me want to get to know Mollie as a woman and not just my “kid sister,” so I sent her a letter with this proposal:
“Do you think you could possibly find a few minutes each day to write something in a journal or notebook about how you felt that day—any happening that impressed or affected you, changed your thinking, made you understand yourself, or your husband, or your kids, or life a little more? I think it would be a wonderful thing for each of us to do.
“If we write letters, that’s one thing; but keeping a daily journal or diary could be stimulating, and someday we could exchange journals and live each other’s life as well as our own and share a wonderful secret to boot! But the only way it would work is to agree to do it, both of us, religiously, and to be completely honest in the writing. For example, even though you would know I was going to read it someday, if you had any angry thoughts about me, you would have to write them just as you felt them; or, if you liked something I’d written, tell me.
“Perhaps we could each say things about our secret selves in a diary that we couldn’t say in a letter. Even though we knew it would someday be read by the other, it’s not the same as saying it directly TO each other. There are some thoughts I have wanted to express, but I’m afraid to express them for fear of what others might think. And I wonder about many things, which makes me wonder if other women have similar thoughts about such things, or am I peculiar?
“I know it takes great determination to keep up with a journal, and you must have a purpose for doing it. Our purpose would be that we should try to capture the special moments when we have clear insight into something; when something touches us intensely; when something wounds us deeply; when something worries us terribly and we seek and find a solution; and especially when we need to talk and there’s no one to listen.”
Getting to Know My Kid Sister
This proved to be one of the most fruitful ideas I ever had. Remember that this was before we had the Internet and email, and long-distance calls were expensive. For over ten years thereafter, Mollie and I wrote reams back and forth. We didn’t keep a notebook, just wrote pages and pages and mailed them in batches. I came to know my sister almost as well as I knew myself, and to this day we remain a great source of emotional strength to one another.
Mollie didn’t make copies of her handwritten thoughts and letters. For ten years, she simply poured her heart out on paper and sent it to me. Her writing included more details than she could ever remember, so one Christmas twenty years later I handed her writings back to her in the form of a book.
Her most secret, private comments were not included, of course, but all her life philosophy and her insightful and often humorous remarks about raising her children and coping with day-to-day problems were presented by subject categories. Included were her views on marriage and raising the kids, parents and sisters, friendship, and her struggles to get her music degree and set up a teaching studio in her home. She loved her “Book of Mollie,” and I loved creating it.
Why You Should Be Journaling
Many people are journaling today, as was obvious from my keyword search on this topic. I liked the comment in one article that the benefit of journaling is that we get to live our lives twice, which is certainly true for me. I have so many notebooks and journals documenting my life that I don’t have to count on memory to retrieve details of the joys, sorrows, surprises, and blessings of my life—especially the sweet little moments that would have fallen through the cracks if I hadn’t documented them. More importantly, if I hadn’t journaled my life, I could not have published two factual memoirs about my life as a musician’s wife and daughter of a remarkable mother.
All the blogs out there, including my “Personal MUSINGS About Life,” are simply journals in disguise, a way for writers to share pieces of their lives with their readers. But one doesn’t have to be a skillful writer to write letters or keep a journal. I’ve encouraged many a widow to write letters to their deceased husband and tell them all that’s in their heart. And I recently encouraged one to journal about how difficult she is finding it to “let go” after two years of grieving. From experience, I know how healing it can be to write about the loss of a loved one.
After I’d titled this Bulletin, I turned up an excellent article on Psychology Today titled “The Power of Journaling.” Read this article if you need encouragement to journal or wonder what you should write about. Here are two others: How Journaling Can Help You in Hard Times, and We’ve Got 99 Reasons to Journal … Here are Your Top 7.
First published as a Brabec Bulletin on July 8, 2024.
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