The Why: Day 1 Journaling Month

Today begins a 31 day journaling challenge. It's basically like National Novel Writing Month but less of an overall big project with a deadline and stress and kookiness and more of a "please try to jot down your thoughts daily, ok, thanks, bye." So the premise is similar (the premise being that writing is a good thing overall), but it is a slightly different focus and avenue. 

To try to make it a bit easier on the participants they provide daily prompts and inspiration, the first of which boils down to "why?" Why try to write daily? Why make it part of a daily routine? Why bother?

If there is one thing that the rush and thrill of NaNoWriMo has taught me over the last 4 years it is that writing is cathartic. Whether or not anyone ever reads what you write, you have a concrete product at the end of whatever writing session you just finished. Journaling (or blogging, in my case) every day doesn't give you the bragging rights of "I wrote a novel", but it does provide an outlet for a lot of things, whether you need a place to vent, mull over ideas, or a task to take your mind off of the here and now.  

Any long-term social worker will tell you the value of self care. If they don't, they are more likely to be one of the majority of social workers that burn out in the first few years after beginning their career.  Self care can be a lot of things, from doing nothing for a few hours to rock climbing.   For me, it is keeping busy. Being idle for too long makes me antsy and I start to feel like I am forgetting about things or just wasting my time.

Journaling is often something we ask clients to do in order to provide them with insight or to gather more information about a situation. It is a useful tool that provides them with a method of self-care and reflection while also giving us a solid way to begin helping them figure out where they are. So to the question of why journal everyday, I say why not? Maybe taking time out every day to journal, even if it is for just a short time, will provide me with deeper insight and a chance to figure out where I am and what I need to do to get to the next par
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