Member-only story
Why I’m Using a WhatsApp Journal to Process These Uncertain Times
It’s not a perfect system. But the system you use is better than the system you don’t.
I’ve significantly cut back on my social media usage over the past few years, but I still gravitate toward Twitter for breaking news, election returns, and (as I’ve learned recently) updates about global pandemics. One could make a compelling argument that these are three of the least productive and most anxiety-inducing times to check Twitter, but here we are.
In any event, a few weeks ago I came across a Twitter thread that began with this:
I’ve been meaning to start journaling for years. I know how clarifying it is to process the world around me through writing. As I wrote (naturally) in The Writing Cooperative last year, writing is often “a tool to make sense of the thoughts and ideas bouncing around in our brains. A tool to process the endless complexities of life. To bring some order to our questions and doubts, anxieties and inclinations, by distilling them on the page.”
Yet even though I’ve long known the clarifying power of writing, I never succeeded in making journaling even a minor part of my daily routine. Why? Probably for the same reason that many of us intend to do things we know would be good for us but don’t actually do them: I just didn’t.
Until these tweets (and the global pandemic that prompted them) inspired me to attempt, once again, to build a journaling habit that would work for me. It would need to fit my existing lifestyle, rather than requiring a dramatic change (any more than the past few weeks already have). It would need to be something I could do easily, not something that I’d come to see as a burden or obligation or one more to-do on my to-do list. If I wanted this journaling thing to stick, I realized, it would need to be digital, quickly accessible, seamlessly update-able, and part of a service or app I already use.
