I signed up for a writing habits class back in December. My top goal when I signed up was that I wanted to have a more consistent, sustainable relationship with my writing practice. I wanted to rebuild my habit from scratch mostly because by the end of 2020 I felt like I had very little of it to hold onto anyway. While I didn’t talk about this publicly, I spent a better half of last year working on a book proposal that didn’t end up selling.

From a marketing and business perspective, I completely understood the why and the how. On a personal level, I was gutted. The book was memoir personal essays and not selling it felt like the world reflecting back to me that I wasn’t a good writer, that my story had no value, and that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to spend my time on.

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.