Should I keep a diary/journal?
I'm 17 and male, if that matters. I LOVE writing. I kind of want to start writing in a diary but every time I've tried I would always forget about it and end up wasting a perfectly good notebook. I don't want to JUST write a play-by-play of everything that happens everyday. I want to write about my feelings about pretty much everything, or what just comes to mind as I'm writing. Do you think keeping a diary is a good idea for someone of my age? I like to put a lot of detail into my writing, but how much detail SHOULD be in a diary? Do you think I can keep up writing a diary? I'm a senior in high school want I want to keep a diary for as long as possible until I'm done with college, and maybe I can keep one even longer than that. That would mean buying multiple journals of course. The picture shown is of my journal I'm planning on writing my diary in. I like the design, do you?
Do you keep a diary/journal?
Don't you just LOVE when you question gets deleted? You ask, "what color is your room?" and someone deletes your question! WTF? Yes, sort of. I keep a journal of exercises that I do, and their effect on my body. 25 years now of weightlifting. What I learned; For mass; lift heavy once a week. Rest is where you build mass, not during the lifting. For definition; lift light daily. Lots of reps! Up to age 40-50, you "peak" in your physical strength. From that time on, your body does a very slow decline in strength. You ability to lift gets less and less. When lifting, and your goal is mass; increase what you lift by up to 1 pound per wek. No heavier. Shocks the muscles if you increase the weight heavier. I started lifting at age 35. All I did was weightlifting. At age 60, my present age, I included aerobics in my exercise program. Gazelle, Schwinn Stationary Bike, horizontal leg press machine. Which I do daily. What changed: From age 45, to age 60, my lifting heavy very slowly declined. From a peak of 587 pounds of lifting at age 45, down to my present 200 lbs. of lifting, at age 60. Then I took up aerobics. Gradually my lifting started to increase again. Now 220 lbs. and I am back to lifting increase at 1 pound per week! Also interesting; at age 50, I was happy with the torso and legs. Big and muscular. From age 50, to age 60, even though I was lifting less and less, my body stayed the same shape and size. Damn, no change. Even as I got older. With the aerobics, especially the leg press machine, I started out pushing 100 reps., 10 lbs. of weight on the machine. NOW I am pushing 100 reps., 200 lbs. - per day. Again, Damn. It still feels like when I started with 10 lbs. Not even a sweat or strain.
Do you keep a journal or diary? Does it help?
Yes. I keep a journal. Helps with what? I have been keeping one for years. Actually, I have two journals. One is like a diary. I try to capture my activities and the important events of the day in it. The other is more of a working journal or a notebook. I use it to write down thoughts, ideas, essays, scenes for novels, etc. I take the latter with me everywhere so I am never in the demoralizing situation in which I have a great idea but nowhere to write it down, promise to remember it later, only to forget it when later comes. Even in a completely wired digital world, there are moments when we find ourselves between hotspots or without a reliable keyboard. Being able to write by hand in a notebook or journal is the mental equivalent of camping out in the woods. It allows you to be creative without technology.I wrote about the benefits of journal writing in a widely viewed essay. Here is the link to it. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/j...
What can I do to force myself to keep a diary/journal?
Keeping a journal has always been very therapeutic for me. Don't "force" anything! Write like it was an extension of your thoughts...only you know! Look at your entries as being your thoughts on the table where you can look at them and have some type of resolution to whatever issue you are going through. I have not tried a video diary. Not sure I ever would.
Boys do you keep diaries/journals?
you don't have to tell anyone about it so what does it really matter. for some people it releives them of thier stress and they enjoy it. it's also kinda fun to reread back into the past. think about it, when youre really old don't you think it would be interesting to see what was going on back then. FYI, i'm a girl, i also hate calling mine a diary, it's a journal
Why do women keep diaries and journals?
I never was really into them as a young child but my Freshman year of high school I got a fortune cookie telling me to, so I figured, "why not?" My past attempts at diary-keeping had been failures because I hadn't had much to write about and hadn't remembered to write every day, but this journal was different. I didn't write every day, but at least once a week, and what I liked about it then was that it was like writing someone a letter. At that time, I was experiencing a lot of social isolation and was finding my bearings after two years away from my friends, so I felt almost as though I'd found a friend in myself through use of the journal. Halfway through the year I stopped writing in it, and picked it up again a year later. Sophomore year was really "The Year of the Boys" for me, because I had several crushes throughout that year and I also met two people that I would end up dating later on (though I had no notion of that at the time). Most of my entries were about events-- plays and movies I'd seen, sleepovers I went to-- but in a few I talked about my self esteem issues and whatnot. Here I learned another value of a journal: home therapy. Junior year I had my first boyfriend... and second, and third. The third was the big love of my high school life. First kiss and first everything else. We were together for a year, and my journal helped me record all my happy memories so that I could remember every sweet thing he ever said to me and every fun date we went on. The summer between my junior and senior year I talked about college and how I worried it would affect my relationship. I talked about my concerns. Again, it served more as therapy. Senior year I used it to record dates, again, and for poetry. Now that I have graduated I've found a new reason for keeping a journal: I can see, reading my old entries from Freshman year, how far I have come. After my breakup, for a while I just wanted to forget about my ex. I could do so-- knowing that my memories were stored in my journal. So that's why I keep a journal.