My Journal Sucks

I've tried to journal more times than I can count. Twenty-plus attempts, each one starting with optimism and ending in the same predictable collapse. A few days of writing about nothing, a few more days of beating myself up about it, then silence. The whole thing falls apart because I genuinely have no clue what to write about.

The longest stretch I managed was two months. That run, combined with sorting out my sleep, was transformative. I dare say it was the happiest I'd ever been. Then it stopped. Not because I lost interest in being happy, but because I ran out of things to say.

Here's what baffles me: I write constantly. I take endless notes on things. Ideas, observations, random thoughts that I capture and file away. But journaling? That's a different beast entirely. It's not that I can't write. It's that I don't know what a journal entry is supposed to be.

I've tried the prompts. Those curated questions designed to unlock your innermost thoughts. They feel forced, like I'm performing introspection rather than actually doing it. I've tried the guides. None of it sticks because when I sit down to journal, I have absolutely nothing to say. The irony isn't lost on me. I can write blog posts about technology, about privacy compromises, about switching platforms. I can work through complex arguments. But ask me to write a journal entry about my day and I freeze.

I think the real problem is treating journals like performance. Like someone might read them one day and judge the quality of my inner life. That's ridiculous. Nobody's going to read them. That's the entire point of a journal. But the performance anxiety lingers anyway, making me censor and second-guess every sentence before I write it.

The notes I take throughout the day don't have this problem. They're functional. They capture information I might need later. They're not trying to be anything. But the moment I open something labelled "journal" my brain expects profundity. It expects narrative. It expects something worth preserving.

When I managed that two-month streak, I wasn't trying to be interesting. I was just typing out whatever was in my head. Some days that meant writing about actual things. Other days it meant writing "I have nothing to write about today" and moving on. The benefit wasn't in the quality. It was in the act of emptying my head.

I still don't have a clue what I'm doing with journaling. I don't know what I'm supposed to write about. I don't know how to make "I woke up, made coffee, walked the dog" interesting enough to justify opening the app. And I'm tired of feeling like I'm failing at something that's supposed to be helping me.