I think I’ve lived with anxiety my entire life. I can remember being 7 years old and telling my mom that I had a really bad stomach ache and didn’t want to get in the car. She thought I was just feeling physically off, but looking back I know now that my stomachache was a symptom to a larger reality. My anxiety manifests in my stomach, in the tension in my shoulders, and in a looming fear over most things in my life.

I wasn’t officially treated for anxiety until I was 21 years old and started therapy. My long-term care routine for my anxiety has up until now been talk therapy. It’s helped me so much to have a dedicated space where I can work through the ins and outs of how (and sometimes why) my anxiety manifests. I’ve written before that this last winter re-triggered a lot of dormant fears and anxious reactions. It has been a time when I’ve especially turned to the small ways I can help myself manage.

It is April and the sun is officially out in Portland. After a few months of struggling with my mental health it’s also starting to feel like I have a light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to how I’ve been feeling. I’ll dive in more on a separate post about what this past winter has taught me, but first I want to share how intentional I’m being with spring cleaning.

Last weekend I started dividing up my books into two piles, those I was going to donate and those I was going to keep. I’ve been committing to a more minimalist lifestyle, which includes paring down my closet and most of the things that I keep just for the sake of keeping them. I’m embracing the same spring cleaning tactics when it comes to my mental health.

January was one of the hardest months I’ve had in the last year. I am definitely hitting my COVID wall. All I could think about these past few weeks was how much I missed the old routines that were so mine a year ago and now are nonexistent. It hasn’t helped that the days in Portland are so short right now. At its worst the sun was rising close to 8am and setting by 4pm. The grey cloudy skies got old pretty quickly and I missed the sun, warmth, and just a visual reminder that life didn’t look like how I felt.

The strain I’ve felt on my mental health is something I’m working to relieve. As a result, a lot of my February mental wellness routine is catering to where I actually am versus where I wish I was (in sunny Mexico and feeling like life was great and COVID-free). While part of me is frustrated because I wish the same things would work all the time, the truth is that my routines have to iterate to respond effectively to my mental health.

I have to be honest - the title is clickbait, mostly because I don’t actually think you can “fail” at journaling, but I do think that most of us think that we do. I have stopped and started journaling so many times over the last few years. Each time I started for a different reason and stopped for a different reason.

The most harmful perspective we can own when trying to journal is that there’s only one way or one reason to do it. Each of us are navigating so many different lived realities at any given moment, if journaling is a tool we’re using to navigate those times then it’s bound to be as unique as our circumstances are. It can feel like because there’s a label for it “journaling” that it should be as structured as “eating” in that you do it at a specific time and for a specific amount of time.