Started writing three lines every night before bed, back in July. Not gratitude journal stuff, just whatever was actually running through my head that day. I’m 2 months into it now.
The commute is honestly the reason I tried this in the first place. An hour and a half each way, twice a day, and by the time I got home I’d be so wound up I couldn’t sit still, let alone sleep right. A coworker mentioned she does something similar and I figured it couldn’t hurt to try.
First couple weeks it was mostly complaining on paper. Traffic, my supervisor, the guy who cuts across three lanes at the same exit every single morning like clockwork. Reading it back later was almost embarrassing, how much of it was just noise.
Then wedding season hit. Three weddings in 6 weeks, two of them out of town, and by the third one I was running on fumes and also feeling weirdly low about my own life in ways I didn’t expect walking into a reception hall. That’s when the writing actually started doing something. Not fixing anything. Just gave the feeling somewhere to land instead of sitting in my chest the whole drive home.
Some nights I skip it. If I’m out in the garden until it’s dark pulling weeds or checking the tomatoes, I come in tired in a different way and don’t bother writing anything down. That’s fine too. I stopped treating the streak as ‘the point’ somewhere around week 3.
One thing I noticed is the nights I write right when I walk in the door come out completely different from the nights I wait until I’m already in bed. Door version is sharper, more honest, sometimes not nice at all. Bed version is softer, half asleep, barely legible the next morning when I go back and read it.
My handwriting has gotten worse if anything, which is its own small sign I guess.
It helped alot more than I expected during the wedding stretch, even though I couldn’t have told you why at the time. The tomatoes are doing fine this year too, for what it’s worth, better than last summer’s batch that never really took off.
I’m not going to say any of this fixed anything. The wedding thing especially, I still feel it every time an invitation shows up. But 2 months of doing this instead of just stewing in the car for 90 minutes and then again lying in bed has been different. Quieter maybe. I keep going mostly out of habit at this point, and that seems like enough of a reason for now.