There’s something about the feeling of the pen hitting the paper, where the thoughts jumbling your mind just start to flow out. All the pent-up tension and emotion you have built up is suddenly released and it’s as if your mind is just free.

I know journalism and the idea of thoughts on paper isn’t for everyone. But for me personally, if I didn’t have the ability and allowance to express myself on paper for no one’s pleasure and acceptance but my own, I would quite literally go crazy.

The act of journaling can be as simple or as complicated as you make it.

I’m gonna break it down for you (or do my best to).

Firstly, just let yourself just be.

There really isn’t any step or order to writing. I hate the idea of being forced to write and forced to do something; that’s partially why I float in and out of writing. The thing about journaling is it’s all that you make and all that you accept it to be. No one is going to read what you’re writing unless you want them to! You write for yourself. If there really were rules, that would be rule number one.

I used to force myself to write simply because I wanted to have more to reread when I was older, or because I wanted to say that I journaled (I guess I thought that was cool). And I’ll admit, it is nice and nostalgic to go down memory lane and see how dramatic my 11-year-old self was. But it’s even nicer reading what I really felt like senior year when I was so lost in myself and felt so in love with a boy who didn’t love me back that all I could do was pour my heart out into an empty lined book to get the words off my chest.

The thing about journaling is that it’s therapeutic for you and only you in the way that you allow it to be. Journaling, as is everything in your life, is all that you make it be. Heck yeah, you can have a journal that you force yourself to write in every day just for the sake of going back and reading what you felt like on this day of this year. But you have to let yourself have it be how you want.

I was introduced to journaling at around the age of 11. I remember the first real journal I kept and maintained being purple with pink, orange and white stripes. It had a magnetic bar that held it shut and I always wrote in it with a purple or orange colored pen. I remember bringing it with me to Hawaii and writing about how each day was and how much me and my best friend at the time didn’t get along at all and how my brain thought it was the end of the world.

I then remember as I got into high school I had a composition notebook that I just filled with quotes that I either made up or heard in movies or songs that I thought were the best in the world. They were horrendous. Absolutely, without a doubt, an embarrassing notebook. Trust me, I read it a few weeks ago. But at the time, it helped. This was sort of my first introduction to what I felt like journaling was and how it helped me therapeutically.

I remember writing letters to the boy I thought I loved in eighth grade and how he liked my best friend and I thought that destroyed me and that I wasn’t going to find anyone else ever (eighth grade, really?).

I wrote lyrics from every other sad song I knew because that’s the only emotion I thought existed at the time. I guess those few years were hard for me.

This turned into my “big” introduction to journaling because this is when it became therapeutic for me.

Part way through sophomore year was when it really started to set in for me. I have a journal, it’s a brown, faux leather journal with a big Mickey Mouse on the cover. I can’t even remember where I got it from but man, did I (do) adore that thing. I started out writing very psychological things. I think the first three entries start out with “I don’t understand why…” and something about people or minds or why we do certain things. Then I went into a period of writing poems or what I thought were poems but really were just a few words on a line about feelings I didn’t actually have. I just wanted the pages to look cool.

At about the start of junior year was when I started to get the hang of what I really liked. Believe me, nothing I write really makes any sense still, but it's what helps me.

That’s the beauty of journaling. You try 12 different things and start to learn what works for you. As I said before, it’s all that you make it out to be.

That brown, Mickey Mouse journal has turned into one of my prized possessions. It’s filled with songs tied to memories, tear-stained pages, grocery lists, letters to people and about every emotion I could’ve possibly felt in two years. I wrote about my first real heartbreak and how I’ll always love that certain someone even if it’s ridiculous to. I wrote about my friends and how I wouldn’t have gotten through high school without them. Or what I felt every morning, sitting in my car before school watching the day get brighter. That journal was filled by my junior year through my senior year and I don’t know if I could give you anything more personal than that.

I have another journal, again faux brown leather, but this time a whole bunch of mini Mickeys covering the front and back, and it’s again filled with the same things. Still continuing on with my life, it started out with my summer before my freshman year of college to this present day. And honestly, I’m about three-quarters of the way through and I don’t know what I’m going to have next because I can’t find a brown Mickey journal anywhere else.

This journal only seems to get deeper, dealing with all my complications of freshman year once again — how much passion I’ve lost in the past two years to finding my happy medium of still loving that boy from what seemed like forever ago to finding new things to have heartache over.

The thing about journaling is that some days it’s going to work, and some days it’s just not. Allowing yourself to just let go for a few moments is what makes the simplicity of it work.

You don’t even have to journal in the way I do. Do what works for you! As of recent months, I’ve started a new journal. It’s a simple red moleskin and it’s turned into my random journal that I haven’t really found a purpose for but love nonetheless. It’s filled with things like what I’ve taught myself, short poems, goals and stream of consciousnesses, 30 days of journaling, more goals, and my new favorite thing: tying months to colors and feelings. I don’t know how I decipher writing in this journal from that but some things work in this and some things work in that.

I could’ve given you a straightforward list of what journaling is or could be. But there weren’t specific points I wanted to make. Journaling and wanting to journal is all in your hands, left to your abilities. It can be as simple and complex as you let it. You can have five different journals for multiple different things.

I had a dream journal at one point that I still use every now in then just for when I wake up from a really good dream and want to remember what it was or try to figure out when it happened.

I have a journal that’s just letters to people that I feel at certain times and how they make me feel in that moment.

My current journal is filled with loose papers and pictures that went along with that day or that moment. It has pages ripped out and pages taped back in. Pages that are folded up so small and tucked in the back because I never want to read them again but never want to forget what I felt when writing them.

I’ve learned what’s worked for me and this is it. It’s different for everyone.

In the end, if anything, let yourself just be. Do things naturally or find a way to make it happen for yourself. Whichever you feel helps you.