These days are enjoyable because I like my work and love my family, but I don't get further than "went to work, afterwards cooked <some meal> and played <some game> with <one of my kids>, in the evening <watched some movie / read some book>"...
What are you journaling on a daily basis?
It took time to realize that was worth writing down.
Honestly I look back 10 years and see things like you describe. "I went to the gym for an hour, worked on this or that, blah blah", and I really love seeing that too. That's life man. Those memories fill your brain up with experiences and a sense of time if you let it. Just remembering how fit I used to be makes me happy and makes me want to do that again.
“Had a headache. Went to bed early” seeing how often my grandpa was sick was very eye opening to me.
“Got the X repaired/replaced. Cost me $Y and it took Z days to finish”
“I sat and just visited with $Child. What a good kid. He’s just a teen. He told me about his friends and school”
Etc. I don’t know. I guess reading a normal life makes me feel better. Growing up I thought they were perfect. Seeing they were people just like me with very similar struggles is actually fun.
I haven’t taken the time to go though these diaries after he passed, but I did take a peek since I never really knew what he wrote.
The little I saw was so surprisingly mundane, like you describe.
I can’t quote it now, being thousands of miles away, but I remember something about my mom making a tasty soup.
I found it endearing but also forgiving, since I’ve struggled with journaling myself. Your post reminded me now that it’s okay to note the mundane.
- “I could have handled X better by doing Y.”
- “Seeing A made me curious about B; maybe look into that.”
- “I really tried at K, but oof didn’t work out; let’s try L tomorrow!”
- “I did really good at P, Q, and R today — I’ll get a treat tomorrow and start on S.”
Mostly just internal monologue kinds of things, but there’s three benefits I’ve noticed:
- I don’t think about frustrations as much if I write them down.
- I am better at self-compassion when I externalize the monologue.
- I slowly adjust my monologue to reflect how I word it in writing, eg how I choose to frame things or what kinds of things I notice.
I usually suffer from the same. Some periods I do bother bulleting, as reminders for thoughts to expand on later in the day. But I never do, and then only the bullets remain - as a kind of headstone for unwritten thoughts. Still, they are better than nothing.
This makes sense to me because a) content-wise I consider learning / making sense of what I experience in my life to be both intellectually and emotionally interesting and b) text-length-wise 6 bullets force you to really boil things down to the core