Moonshyness - In Between Worlds

About journaling and more.

the ups, the downs, and the in betweens.

I've been journaling pretty regularly for the past 8 years (with little breaks in between). Ever since I started I pretty much decided my journals would all be "anything goes", meaning there would be no strict guidelines on formatting or content. I also call it creative journaling for that reason, as it encompasses far more than just regular journal entries. As such, the contents of my journals are colorful accumulations of diary entries, creative writing such as poems, essay-like writing, collages, drawings, doodles, wild scribbles, etc.

As with any hobby or habit, my relationship to journaling has changed a lot in the past few years. I've experienced some journaling fatigue, sometimes also accompanied by guilt that I was not keeping up with my habit. As we all know life sometimes gets in the way, and even though it often helped me to write out my thoughts, if I was going through prolonged stress, it sometimes felt like journaling about it made me feel worse. I rarely had energy to express myself creatively and every written entry would just be me venting the same feelings over and over, creating a strange cycle that seemed to amplify my misery instead of alleviate it.

My current journal has roughly 16 pages left. I started it in January 2023, feeling a bit fatigued from the prior year where journaling first started feeling quite weary to me, possibly due to a lot of stressful big life transitions happening. I decided I would focus more on the visual/creative aspect and only write when I truly felt like it. Then more stressful stuff happened, and I lost my passion for journaling almost entirely.

It was then that I noticed that when I had the urge to put my thoughts somewhere but felt fatigued, writing with pen and paper made me feel limited, like my hands couldn't keep up with my thoughts. When I needed an immediate outlet to express my thoughts, just opening a word document and going at it would make me feel more satisfied than grabbing my journal and writing them down by hand.

I was going to write all of this down in my journal too, but I decided to put it here instead, just because I felt like it. I've been wanting to get into blogging forever and would like to eventually have a more personal blog but tumblr is close enough for now, as it is my old homebase in a way.

Like many people on here, my teenage years were defined by tumblr. I spent over ten years on this platform (on a diff. account from 2009-2017) mostly just soaking in content and not really expressing myself. Admittedly I wasted a lot of time on here instead of having real life experiences but somehow it still felt like a less brain-rotting way of consuming content than whatever we have going on these days on the big three.

That's why I ultimately decided to come back here, at least for a while.