Journey Journal: An Internal Journey

For our Journey in Literature class we were assigned to keep a journal for eight weeks where we would write five times a week, that's a total of 40 entries, the first things that came to our mind. This journal would be our go-to place whenever we felt like venting, writing, speaking our mind or just looking for something to do in the meantime; it would be our guide through our internal journey. In those 40 entries we will be able to see the course of our thoughts while writing the first things that pop into our head. It is an exercise where we write and don’t stop writing to think of a particular detail to write about, we just keep our hand moving and our thoughts circulating in our heads. We can truly get a glimpse of who we are and we can do it by opening up to ourselves through writing.

          Since the beginning, we were given a total of 5 rules that we had to follow as we were writing in our journal, and we always had to keep them in mind. This rules said:

1. Don't crossout
2. Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar
3. Don't think, don't get logical
4. Go for the jugular
5. Keep your hand moving

We always had to follow this rules, and at first it was a little difficult for me, because I am so used to writing and instantly checking for spelling or grammar errors and looking to correct them, but with this exercise I forced myself to not think of those. The first few entries I made where a little rough regarding the rules, but once I started to get the hang of it and I actually started to "not think", and my entries became very open and easy to do. 

On the first week my writing seemed very essay-like, like I was supposed to be writing a paper on a topic based on how my day was going or how I was feeling. When I started approaching the second week of writing, it became much more easier to write whatever popped into my head no matter how random it may seem, and as the weeks passed by, my entries became much more personal and truly resembled all of the thoughts that I had going on around my head, plus, it also helped me to actually organize all of those thoughts and be able to work with certain situations. Instead of writing for someone else to read and approve of, I wrote to please myself and to bear with everything going on in my life. Sometimes I would write very clearly and grammatically okay, but some days I would just scribble so much that the letters would mix together and the words would become a bit more difficult to read. Overall there were a lot of different types of entries, depending on my mood and the things that were going on and it became very easy for me to follow the "first thoughts" technique. 

When I started writing I would start with the thing that bothered me or impacted me the most. For example, one day in February I was really stressed out because I had my first Calculus 2 exam. I was so worried that I didn't study enough or that I studied the wrong thing that I literally started writing mathematical formulas in my journal. The funny thing is that I actually followed all the rules that were given to us at the beginning of the journal, I never stopped to actually think of any of those formulas, I just wrote them as I first thought of them and then continued with whatever I thought of next. After that I just kept on writing about other worries I had about other classes and a bit of personal stuff, but most of all I always came back to my Calculus exam and how worried I was for that. After finishing my journal I noticed that I felt a bit relieved for actually getting all of that out of my system, and I wanted to check if the formulas I wrote were correct, and they were!

In the end, I got to see that this journal was a great experience for me to connect with my inner-self a bit more. It helped me learn how to trust my thoughts and just go with whatever my mind felt like writing. It was a great way to be able to manage my thoughts and to talk about certain things that I wouldn't be comfortable talking about with other people. It showed me that there are little things that bother me in the day, and writing about them really helped me cope with some of them. I learned about myself, how proud I am of being Puerto Rican, how I'm a much more fluent writer in English than I thought I was, and how I deal with that internal journey that we all carry with us in our lives. It was a great exercise that I would recommend to everyone, because it truly helps us understand ourselves and situations regarding ourselves. I myself will continue writing in journals such as this one, it's a great way to learn about myself and to vent every once in a while when I need it.