The intro post to this series is here, journaling for mental clarity is here, journaling through fear is here. Journaling to clear your mind is here. Journaling to work out choices is here.

I first heard about 5 year diaries a few years ago. The idea is simple enough: 5 year diaries have a page for every day of the year, but the page is divided into 5 sections. Every day for 5 years you write a few lines about your day, and in the end you have a diary that reflects on how you and the world around you have changed over those 5 years. You can see an example of such a diary here. There are also 3 year diaries that work the same.

I journal daily, and have journaled daily for many years (with breaks for a few months here and there), so you’d think that a 5 year diary would have little to no appeal to me: after all, what is the point of summarizing what I already wrote? That was indeed the case for a good long while, until a month ago to be exact. On the 22nd of July I sat down and created a 5 year diary for myself.

Midori makes beautiful 5 year diaries, but I found the format unappealing. I hate it when something has lines that don’t run all the way to the edge of the page, and I didn’t like the diary’s size and layout. So I took a blank A5 Midori Journal Codex that has one page per day, and created my own 5 year diary. I had purchased the journal on a whim when I was last in Paris, and I hadn’t found any use for it previously. It has 368 pages with no formatting beyond two lines on the bottom of each page that I used to write the day of the month and the month in.

This isn’t a notebook review blog post. It also isn’t a “you should start a 5 year diary” post, nor is it a “make it don’t buy it” post. It’s a “how I journal” post, and specifically, it’s a “how I journal for self improvement” post. It’s not titled that way because I have another post planned on this topic in the future. This is about a specific technique that I’m trying out now, and which may or may not work for me or for you.

Here’s what’s going on:

Like many cancer patients, I ended up with PTSD. Among other delights, my brain is firmly programmed to think that I don’t have more than a few days to live, so there’s no point in planning ahead. I used to love planning ahead, and I used to be very good at it. I had systems, and notebooks and planners galore. And now I have a brain that simply will not accept the fact that I will be around by the end of next week. It’s irrational, which is why it’s a mental disorder, but it’s also not moving. It started as a very useful coping mechanism, one that allowed me to survive from chemo treatment to chemo treatment, but now it’s refusing to go away, and it’s affecting my quality of life pretty significantly. Nobody likes to live with the constant thought that there is no future to look forward to (and to those curious, no, that’s far from the only delightful affect PTSD has on me. It’s just the one that’s relevant to this post).

So the state of things for the past two years is that planning ahead is like pulling teeth: painful, traumatic, and something that I try to actively avoid. So far I’ve had little to no success dealing with it, and you’d think I’d give up by now but I won’t because I’m stubborn like that. Which brings me to the 5 year diary as a journaling for self improvement practice.

I have an upcoming trip to the US at the end of the month, and I’ve been fighting my brain for the last two months trying to get it to let me plan for this trip. The trip is important and expensive and requires careful pre-planning and my brain has been super obstinate about me not getting to do that. Imagine having a phone call with your bank manager, high-school principal and class bully rolled into one and you’ll get a taste of what’s going on in my head every time I sit down and try to plan ahead. Are you getting heart palpitations? Are you hands sweating? Would you do anything to hang up the phone?

So on the 22nd of July I had enough of that. I took out the Midori notebook and dated 365 pages by hand out of rage. I was going to prove to my brain that I was here to stay, at least for the next 5 years. The idea was to create daily positive feedback, a trail of breadcrumbs that proves that I’m here to stay and I plan on staying alive for a while yet. As I write more than a page a day in my regular journal, I don’t get that positive feedback unless I stop and read back entries, and I rarely have time for that. The page layout of the 5 year diary, coupled with the fact that there is some show-through to the previous page, helps reinforce a constant reminder that hey, I’m not dead yet, and that I’m making good progress to keep staying alive. I wish I had thought of it sooner, so I could show my brain today where I was last year (the first year post chemo), and where I was a year before that (actively getting chemo or dealing with aggressive cancer), but better late than never.

Will it work? Maybe. It’s something that I haven’t tried before. Will this post help anyone else? Maybe. If you’re suffering from depression and anxiety maybe this will help. Maybe this is the way you start a journaling habit – after all, 2-3 lines a day isn’t much to ask, and I sometimes batch entries to 2-3 days at once. In any case I’ll update how the experiment goes as the year progresses, and if this does happen to help you, I’d love to hear about it.