Midway Staff

News Editor Taariq Ahmed argues that daily journaling can help people reflect on past experiences and learn from them to shape the future.

On the eve of my senior year, I scoured my closet for a blank notebook to use for English class. I knew there had to be one in there somewhere. After screening through years of schoolwork, I found not a blank notebook but a full one filled with the thoughts of previous years. It was a journal I had kept from ninth grade.

I sat at my desk and opened it, examining the words and how they were strung together. During middle school and into my freshman year, I used to sit down every night and write about how my day had gone. Feeling inspired by my younger self, I started journaling again that very night — and my reinstated journaling has been paying off since.

A tedious habit to keep up but a rewarding one to develop, journaling has given me so much since I got back into it, and the truth is that every student in an environment like U-High can mentally and emotionally benefit from the practice. 

Journaling is appealing because it gives full agency to the writer. It’s an independent project and can be whatever one needs it to be, whether it’s paragraphs of reflection or a few words that encapsulate how one feels. My journal had both.

There is no competitive aspect to journaling — it’s for the person who is writing and their eyes only. One thing that made me happy while reading my old journal was how I recorded my stories without concern for how my writing looked in the eyes of somebody else. I was free.

Perhaps most consequential of all, journaling gives one a window into what their life used to be like, bringing back both positives to reminisce in and negatives to reflect on. Reading my writing from years ago was cringeworthy, but it helped me realize how much I have grown and changed since moving to Lab.

As I learned when moving to Lab two years ago, journaling is demanding of time and energy. But a person can journal every other day, or every week, or every other week or add just a few words every day. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be planned, it can just be spontaneous, jotting down your feelings and thoughts when it feels right. Journaling is a free therapy session with oneself, and in a place like U-High, everyone can utilize it to de-stress whenever they need.