I have tried. I have really tried to make this bloody journaling thing work. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to throw in the towel because I am genuinely stuck. If you’re relying on prompts from the new journal API to spice up your daily entries, like I am, you to might hit a snag if your life is as uneventful as mine tends to be.

My mornings kick off religiously at 6am. It’s a straightforward routine: get everything ready for Lucie’s school departure a bit past 7, enjoy a solitary coffee, then play chauffeur for my wife to take her to work. Once back home, I’m hunkered down in my home office, with film soundtracks as my loyal companions. Sounds like a script for a riveting blockbuster, right? Not exactly.

Sure, there are occasional deviations from the script. I go running, and sprinkle in the occasional podcasts. But really, what grand tales are there to narrate in a journal? It’s not like I’m scaling mountains or traversing exotic jungles. What do you write about when your life doesn’t venture beyond the ordinary? Definitely not more navel-gazing or empty promises of “I’ll write more journal entries. I really super-duper promise this time”.

It’s my very ordinariness that poses such a challenge to me. I realise that I am comparing my insides to other people’s outsides when I look for inspiration online. Yet still wonder how to make the mundane interesting? This also bleeds into my photography, I don’t go anywhere, nor do anything, intriguing. How do I find stories worth telling in a day that unfolds with the predictability of a sitcom rerun?

I don’t struggle for ideas for blog posts because they often abstract. Not born from my boring existence, created from a mind that wanders further than my feet. I can’t tell tales of my existence because there are none to tell. Don’t get me wrong, I am content with the predictability of my regular life, after all, not every day needs to be a headline-worthy adventure. I just long for some narrative to tell from within the folds of the everyday.