Journaling in Hospital
- I’ve been spending practically every day for the past week or so with my dad in hospital.
- There’s this phenomena that when you most need journaling, the it will help you the most, you find yourself least able to do it.
- Hospitals are journaling hostile environments. There are no tables to use, there’s constant noise and distractions, there’s zero privacy and you never know when the staff will pop into the room with something. Whether you yourself are hospitalized or you’re there with someone else, there’s very little opportunity to crack open your journal and start writing.
- Hospitals are also where weird, interesting, scary and new things happen, so you generally do what to write about them, to process them on paper. Fo instance, today three policemen escorted a prisoner into the heart surgery department. It wasn’t something I ever expected to see, a sort of non-sequitur that took me a minute or two to process.
- The solution is to take temporary notes on your phone, put a reminder for an appointment with your journal in the evening or when things quiet down around you.
- If you’re the one hospitalized, try to journal two or three times a day, documenting what’s going on, how you’re feeling, what the staff said, who visited you, etc. The best time to journal is during the nursing staff shift changes, because that’s when nobody will bother you.
- Journaling is like running – oftentimes it’s really hard to start, but I haven’t regretted a run or a journaling session yet.
Writing at Large 