I use a program for Mac called Journler.  I can tag a post “medication” if I’ve blathered in an entry about my meds.   This way, I can go back and read what’s up with the pills, when I’ve changed them, and how they’ve made me feel.  It’s a funny thing to say “made me feel,” as though the meds make you feel.  The illness makes you feel, the meds just mediate between that and what you should be feeling.  The intensity.  That’s all I’ve found meds ever able to do — reduce reactions to events to a more manageable whirlwind of emotion.

The doctor doles out dull advice about journaling. “It’s sometimes cathartic to get it down on paper,” he says.  This may be true.  It’s a necessary part of the day.  I’m compelled to write in the thing, usually around 1200 words per day of, as I’ve called it, blather.  With the occasional insight mixed in.  Talking to myself, getting self-conscious and nervous about how I’m appearing to myself on the computer screen — that’s all part of it.

It’s not easy keeping a journal.  You have to learn to let go of your inner censoring demons or otherwise what’s the point?  The point, really, is to get the words out.  Any words at all.  Write enough words (maybe around 1200) and you start to say what you came in the door to say in the first place.  I’d like to say that it doesn’t matter what the words are, but it does.  It does matter what you write in your journal.  I try to steer myself away from ranting at myself, the self-flagellation, the self-hatred.  This is not easy, as this is my default thought-setting, the tone and timbre of my life as soon as I wake up in the morning.  But you must rise above this kind of thinking, even in the most private of spaces, in a diary, because thought becomes  action.  Think you hate yourself, you will hate yourself.  It’s a tough trick, ignoring those thoughts and writing anyway.