Notebooks will wait for you...

In the last few months, I've heard from multiple friends about their struggles with journaling.

In the past, the “journaling block” felt easier for me to overcome. Pick up a pen and paper, and see what happens. But for the last few weeks, as I navigated through the world and local events that didn’t feel okay, I stopped writing in my journals, and I just couldn’t find my way back, even though I wanted to and knew that it would help.

Usually, our evening routines start with family dinner, where we share stories and hear check-ins from everyone’s day, which is followed by some hangout time in the living room and the kids’ eventual bedtime. During that time, I would start winding down to read or work on my creative project, and eventually, spend the last part of my day with my journals. It’s a known and comfortable routine for me, and I was excited to incorporate Night Routine Journal from Wilde House Paper when I picked it up from Baum-kuchen.

But right around that time when I picked up the Routine Journal from BK, my anxiety about immigration started peeking. Although I began filling in my Routine Journal and left some marks on it for a few days, I couldn’t continue. Every night, I would manage to go through our family routine, and as soon as the kids retired to their rooms, I would read the news and curl up on the couch with Mango and a blanket, floating in the Netflix world until I absolutely had to go to sleep.

My attempt at starting my Routine Journal

Through a decade of therapy and mentorship, I am very aware of my ways of disassociating myself from my body. One of the easy-to-spot methods is my workaholic tendencies. I know, if I am not paying attention, I could slip into a habit when something is too big to process through my nervous system, because it’s easier for me to work hard rather than sit with my own feelings (or other people’s feelings - very overwhelming for an empath). It looks and feels like a legitimate way to spend any extra time I might have. In the past, I would go into these states of dissociation without any awareness of what was happening, going through life, and wondering why I felt so burned out… Nowadays, I often have The Third Eye keeping a close observation of what’s going on in my inner landscape, having a dialogue with myself. When I was knee-deep in watching shows on Netflix, it went like this.

Me: “I know I want to be spending the evening time, taking care of myself, especially when things are hard. But I have absolutely no desire to open my notebook or pick up a pen.”

The Third Eye: “Clearly, you are aware that this binge-watching habit is unhelpful when you feel anxious and down about the immediate world around you. But all the things that are going on right now are just too much for your nervous system. Right now, do what feels okay to your body, even though it looks like a bad habit. You will return to your body when you are ready.”

So the nights of Netflix-ing went on.

I am also grateful for my close friends and family around me. They know me and also understand how our human inner world mechanism works. So whenever the question of “how are you these days?” came up, I would give my honest answer, “well. I’m in the phase of binge-watching every night because things are just too hard to feel it out.” I received no judgment but all love and support.

So I had my notebooks, including my Routine Journal, stacked on the side for quite a while. Kids didn’t receive any daily love letters from me during that time, and pages on my 5-Year Journal also remained empty. But instead of feeling guilty about these empty pages, I felt a sense of quiet companionship from these notebooks, and I had the inner knowing that they would wait for me.

Once I decided to step out of my comfort zone and participate in the protest, and eventually pulled myself together enough to share a story here, the hopelessness that had put me into binge-watching mode started to lift, and I eventurally returned to my regular evening routines. I still check the news every night, and I do feel a tremendous amount of discomfort when I do, especially in my gut. But instead of then opening my laptop, The Third Eye reminds me to breathe… and that has been helpful.

So, if you're in a season where you can't journal, even though you might know that the act of journaling and writing can be so supportive to you, I see you. I want to forward the kind wisdom that my notebooks shared with me:

“We will be here and will wait for you.”