Journaling Series: Journaling Through Fear

This is the second post in this series. You can find the intro here, and the first post here.

The title of this blog is somewhat ambiguous, and that’s on purpose. Like the famous “litany against fear” that appears in “Dune”, fear is something that you cannot avoid, the best you can do with it is let it wash over you, observe the lessons that it has to teach you, and be left standing stronger and wiser in the end.

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain”.
Frank Herbert, Dune

I’m a cancer survivor, still living through the high risk of recurrence years of my remission. All my close family members have serious, life-threatening medical conditions. I live in a country where rockets are shot at me and my loved ones at regular intervals, where there’s always the threat of terrorism or just regular, run-of-the-mill violence. My government is methodically stripping me, my family and friends of rights and legal protections even as I write this. I spend my weekends (and lately my weekdays) going to protests where both police and counter-protesters have been regularly violent towards us. Being a human being these days is a fear-inducing thing, and I personally am living through a very fear-inducing life.

So it is not surprising that journaling when I am afraid, to work through that fear, has become a staple of my daily journaling habit. I have so many examples of working through it just in the past week, that I can break one out and actually write out an example of my journaling techniques in this case here. Note that my personal notes are messier, and that this is just what works for me, and even then, not all the time. Sometimes it just buys me some time, or eases the fear enough for me to gain some much needed perspective, or get on the phone with someone to talk it through. What I’ve written here is deeply personal, so if you comment, please be kind. It’s not easy to write about any of this.

When You’re Afraid of Breathing

The first and strongest symptoms relating to my cancer were shortness of breath (dyspnea in medical jargon). I’m in remission now, but still within the window where it’s not unlikely for my cancer to return (recurrence in medical jargon). During this time it’s up to me to notice possible recurrence indicating symptoms and flag them to my oncologist (cancer doctor in medical jargon). It’s only up to me: there are no scans, no blood tests, no physical exam that can indicate recurrence. It’s just me going to my doctor to talk about how I felt over the last three months. The main indicator will be the return of the shortness of breath. That same shortness of breath that is at the heart of my PTSD and anxiety attacks.

In short: I really, really don’t like not breathing.

Enter the local weather lately: a never ending heatwave with extreme temperatures and very high humidity that makes breathing outside difficult. Especially when running and walking to and back from protests.

The Fear Journaling Template

That’s not a great name, but that’s what I’ve got for now. I really recommend doing this with pen and paper, and feel free to destroy it once it’s done if you feel uncomfortable with anyone else accidentally reading it. Take out your journal or a loose piece of paper and write the following down:

Fear – write what you’re afraid of in a sentence. Be specific, honest, and don’t make it pretty. Don’t explain anything – just state your fear. Don’t work on more than one fear at once – do them one at a time.
Facts – write down any facts related to your fear. Be honest and thorough and be sure to include everything (both things that corroborate and contradict your fear). Make sure these are all facts and not perceptions, hunches or feelings.
Feelings – go into your feelings related to your fear: shame, anger, frustration, etc. Expand on what it’s making you feel. Don’t self censor – you’re writing this only for you.
Fixes – look at the Facts and Feelings you wrote down and try to come up with fixes that can help ease some of what you’re experiencing. What can you do to get through that frustrating and potentially explosive meeting? How can you get help with the relative that’s been hospitalized? Where can you look for tips on public speaking for the big presentation that you have to give? Again, don’t self-censor. This is just you writing ideas down on paper – it’s not a to-do list. You don’t have to do any of this.
What’s the best outcome – in a sentence write what’s the best possible outcome of the fear that you’re facing.
What’s the worst outcome – in a sentence write what’s the worst possible outcome of the fear that you’re facing. This is the scary part, but it’s worth doing. It’s worth seeing written down and not bouncing around in your head. Go as dark as your mind wants to take you.
What’s the outcome I would bet on – take a step back and read everything you’ve written so far. Consider who you are as a person, the facts you’ve written down, how you’re feeling about things right now, and the outcomes you’ve written down. Then write down the outcome you think is most likely to be realized – the outcome you would bet on. It will fall somewhere along the spectrum between your best and worst outcome, and chances are it will be closer to the best outcome than the worst one. If it is the worst one, then double down on the fixes, get as much help as you can, batten down the hatches and get as ready as you can to deal with its consequences.
When do I check-in next – give yourself a timeframe to return to these notes in – in a day, in a week or even in a few hours. This is both to help you get some distance from it all, and to let your mind feel OK with focusing on other things in the meantime.

Here’s an example of how this all works, from my own journal (warning: this gets pretty dark):

Fear – the shortness of breath that I’m feeling is an early warning that my cancer is back.

Facts – I’m finding it hard to breath outside lately. The heat index is extremely high: high temperatures and high humidity. The air quality index is moderate. I find it difficult but not impossible to exert myself under these conditions – I can still run in the early morning, and I can still walk to places if I need to. I can run normally in the gym, and I can breath normally when I’m inside with the AC on. The shortness of breath started about when the heat wave started. I’m in the 2 year high risk of recurrence window. My lungs aren’t functioning at 100% capacity. I haven’t gotten the results of my cardio-pulmonary exercise test yet.

Feelings – I don’t want to be a burden on my family or my doctor (being “the boy who cried wolf”). I’m terrified of my cancer returning. I’d feel even worse if it returned and I could have raised the flag sooner, and I didn’t because I wasn’t paying enough attention to my body. I would never forgive myself for that.

Fixes – accommodate the weather in my exertion levels and training. Move whatever you can indoors or into cooler hours. Check your breathing status in the gym. Call the hospital to get your CPET results and send them to your lung doctor.

What’s the best outcome – this is nothing, it’s just a result of this heatwave.

What’s the worst outcome – my dyspnea gets worse, and it is the cancer coming back for round 2.

What’s the outcome I would bet on – It’s likely just the weather coupled with my lung situation.

When to check in next – the heatwave will continue well into next week. Check back in next Saturday, after my long run.

We live in a tough world during a tough time. I hope that the ideas here help you out when dealing with whatever curveball life throws at you. The point is to gain more perspective, empathy and some tools when dealing with fear, and most importantly not let all that negativity bounce around in your head. Pen and paper are your friends here, and can help you get out of whatever fear you’re facing. It’s also nice looking back at old fears and realizing that most of them were never realized.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Journaling Series: Journaling for Mental Clarity

I’ve been journaling for many years, and ever since I got sick, I’ve expanded my journaling to be much more than a daily log of the things I saw and did. Journaling has turned into a whole treasure trove of tools, and this series will run through them.

So what is journaling for mental clarity and perspective?

The idea starts with writing things down on paper, to add an additional layer of processing to them. Writing by hand is inherently slow, and requires you to focus on what you are doing.

Then do a mental check in: how busy and noisy is your mind right now? If it sounds like a train station during rush hour, the first part of journaling for mental clarity will be emptying your mind onto the page for as long as it takes for things to settle down a bit. Don’t judge what you write, how your handwriting looks, or even if it’s legible or not. This is just anxious noise. You need it out of your brain and that’s all for now.

This is hard to do, because you’ll automatically turn your editor on and try to edit stuff out, or edit things while you write them down. If it helps, write this bit on scrap bits of paper and immediately destroy them once things quiet down in your brain. You don’t need these thoughts, they aren’t the point of this aspect of your journaling. The point is just to achieve some level of calm inside your mind.

Once there’s some quiet up there, create 2-3 prompts for yourself, things that you will reflect upon daily, and will help you achieve more clarity and perspective into where you are in your life. Your goal with these prompts is to find patterns of things that work and don’t work for you in terms of helping you live the life that you want to live, and to discover and appreciate where you are in that given point in time.

I believe that it’s best if you create your own prompts, but to make this post more concrete and practical, here are the three prompts that I’ve settled on (after trial and error):

What excited me?
What drained me of energy?
What am I grateful for?

I answer these at the end of each day, as part of the structured part of my journal (the unstructured part is the daily log/mind dump that I do and will write about in a later post).

What excited me? – I answer this with a short list of things that made me feel good and energized. After doing this for a few days, you’ll see patterns emerge, and this will help you focus your time and energy on doing more of the things that make you feel good. In particularly chaotic days this prompt changes to What calmed me down? This is what made me make more time for my blog, lego building, using my pens, meeting and connecting with friends, at the expense of the things that emerged from the next prompt.

What drained me of energy? – Again, I answer these with a list of things that made me feel bad, sad, annoyed, frustrated, drained, etc. This is what made me cut down on reading the news to once a day, and only the headlines (I live in a chaotic country). It’s also what made me cut down on social media, and eventually delete Instagram and Threads from my phone (I’ve left Twitter long ago, and I barely go into facebook to catch up on event invites). It also made me mute a good number of WhatsApp groups. Yes, you may not be able to do that, but this isn’t the point. The point is find what isn’t working for you, and do your best to minimize or compensate for the pain that it causes. Mute and unfollow, change the interface you use, have someone to talk to after you’ve dealt with a source of frustration, etc.And sometimes it’s just helpful and comforting to see things written down.

What am I grateful for? – gratitude journaling isn’t new, and I know it sounds cliche and corny, but it works for me, and this is a list of my personal prompts. Feel free to pick something else (like “what did I see or read that made me happy?”). I’ve been using this since the day I got my cancer diagnosis, and it’s probably a bit different than your run-of-the-mill gratitude journaling. The point is to find the smallest, most mundane things that I’m grateful for. They have to be specific, and they have to be everyday, because I started using this as an anchor to give me perspective and appreciation for the very fleeting, very fragile lives we live here. So I’m not “grateful for my family”, I’m grateful for the great phone call we had today, or for the kind message they sent me, or for the way they worried about me when I went to the protest. I’m not grateful for my health, because I’m not 100% healthy, so there’s always something to grumble about, right? I am grateful that I felt generally good today, and was able to go on a run, and two long walks, despite the weather being terrible and my lungs working at their maximum and making me anxious. I’m trying to capture the delight I have in the everyday, because all of that, ALL OF THAT, was taken away from me in the middle of 2021 without a moment’s notice, and all of that can be taken away again. I have no illusions about my mortality and the mortality of my loved ones any more, and I realize that the humdrum of our daily lives will make me easily lose sight of that precious knowledge if I don’t take daily account of it.

I tried a whole list of prompts before I settled on these. If you are looking for some prompt inspiration, try watching this video. That’s where the first two or my prompts came from (the gratitude one predates them by about a year). Once you have 2-3 prompts, answer them every day for 2-3 weeks at least and you’ll start to see patterns emerge. Then it’s up to you to decide what to do about those patterns. The first thing I did was leave two WhatsApp groups that I was in, and mute a third one. I gradually worked up to deleting Instagram this week, and we’ll see how that goes. I now check it once a day on my browser, and it’s a terrible experience, but that’s the point. For the last few days I’ve stopped doom scrolling and gotten back to blogging and reading. Hopefully it will hold, and if not, I have the prompts to help me gain clarity and course correct if I want to.

Journaling Series: An Introduction

I recently finished my Ghosts of Planners Past series, where I went over the various planning systems that I’ve used over the years, their pros and cons and why they all generally failed. I’m now starting a new series of posts, also related to how I actually use my various pens and notebooks, but this time with a different emphasis: it will be more “how to” than “review” oriented.

What I talk about when I talk about journaling

Why do I journal? There are many reasons, and many kinds of journaling that I do, and so it is worth listing them down from the start to give you a rough idea of what I’m talking about when I’m talking about journaling.

Journaling for mental clarity
Journaling to empty my head from needless noise
Journaling to work out choices
Journaling to work out ideas
Journaling to work through fear, anger, procrastination, self-doubt
Journaling to let out steam in a safe place
Journaling for self improvement
Journaling to process the past
Journaling to plan the future
Journaling as reference and an external memory

These are all distinct kinds of journaling, but they are all tied together, and my plan is to address each kind in turn.

What this won’t be about

My journals aren’t works of art. There are zero decorations on the page because I find them distracting. Journals for me are practical tools for personal use only — not heirlooms to be shared with anyone, and not Instagram worthy in any way. If you enjoy decorating your journal pages, taking pictures of them and posting them on social media, that’s fine, of course. It’s just in no way the focus of this series. I’m only going to focus on the writing side of journaling, and not on your handwriting/calligraphy/drawing/decorating/designing skills. There are many other great sources for that, and I encourage you to go and find them if that interests you.

Now that we got all that out of the way, let’s dive in with the first actual post in the series: Journaling for Mental Clarity.

2021: Looking Back at a “Heavy” Year

My hands have been killing me with the worst neuropathy since my treatments began, so I’ve been trying to limit my typing to what I need to do for work. That is why this post took so long to write, and why my posting schedule may be a little off until things improve with my neuropathy.

2021 was a hell of a year for me. It started with me doing Liz Steel‘s excellent Sketchbook Design course. I also took some fantastic and very illuminating tea seminars with Juyan Webster from the Chinese Tea Company. If you have any interest in tea and you get a chance to have a tea seminar with her, I highly recommend it.

Early on in the year is also when a close family member got diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and that’s also when my journalling went on the fritz. This was the notebook I was using at the time, a Moleskine Pokemon Charmander limited edition and I abandoned it 2/3rds of the way through.

Covid was raging, I was working from home, at a new job, and I spent the first quarter of the year trying to fit my drawing and running into the new quarantine rules that kept getting both stricter and more confusing with each iteration. I happily got vaccinated as soon as I could, and I’m still very grateful to the amazing scientists and doctors who came up with vaccines in such a short time frame.
I managed to participate in the OneWeek100People challenge, which is very demanding but also a lot of fun. If you can spare the time I recommend giving it a try.

In the beginning of April I started having shortness of breath (dyspnea) while running. It got worse with time and soon I couldn’t run at all, and then I couldn’t walk very fast or far, climb stairs, etc. After a long and laborious road to get a diagnosis, in the beginning of June I learned that I had cancer, and in the beginning of July I got a diagnosis and started ABVD chemotherapy to treat Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
A few things helped me get through that incredibly difficult time. First and foremost, my phenomenal family (mother, father and brother) that rallied around me and took care of me from the moment of the first diagnosis and to this day. I can’t imagine going through this process without them. Almost as important were my friends, who visited me in the hospital and cheered me up, and kept in touch and cheered me on during the treatments. Finally it was journaling and reading. I started this Moleskine “I am New York” on the day I was first admitted to hospital, and writing in it gave me perspective and kept me sane.

And books? Books have always been my comfort and escape. I saw a few things on Disney+ while I was hospitalized, but books helped distract me from a lot the most unpleasant and painful parts of this journey.
I was happy to discover that one of my favourite Moleskine limited edition series, the denim ones, was back in stock, and so once I finished the “I am New York” journal I moved into this Moleskine “Skinny. Flared. Bookcut.” one. It’s such a well conceptualized and executed design, it was a joy to use. This was when I decided to regularly use fountain pens to journal with, and just use only one side of the page. I have more than enough notebooks to support that decision.

This notebook took me through the second part of chemo to the end of it.

And now, and the beginning of 2022 I started a new journal, a Moleskine Peanuts Sakura. Pretty, right? Let’s hope I get to fill it with good news and positive thoughts.

A new Moleskine for a new and better year.

Some favourites from the past year:

My favourite pen was the Esterbrook Estie Sea Glass. Quite a surprise for me, but it hasn’t been out of rotation since I got it.

Esterbrook Estie Sea Glass – fantastic and beautiful pen.

Another pen purchase that came in at a close second was the Diplomat Elox Rings and the Diplomat Aero (basically the same pen with a slightly different body design). These are wonderful workhorses, and a joy to use.

Diplomat Elox Rings on the left and Diplomat Aero in Champagne on the right.

I didn’t read as much this year as last year, but I did read a few really great books. Here’s a list of a few standouts among them:

The Good War, by Studs Terkel. WWII as I’ve never experienced it before – as seen and told by the “regular people” who lived through it.
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Not an easy read by far, but a breathtaking work of fiction nonetheless. Worth the effort.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. A surprisingly moving tale of a character that you won’t expect to fall in love with, and yet you will.
Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, by Hillary Mantel. Why should I care about Thomas Cromwell? How can you not care about Thomas Cromwell after reading these books? An era and place come to life, in a world filled with complex and compelling characters.
Nomadland, by Jessica Bruder. Watch the movie AND read the book. Both are excellent, and both offer a chance to look into a part of modern living that we were hitherto oblivious of.
Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir. Just a fun and interesting sci-fi novel. If you enjoyed the Martian, you’ll enjoy this.
Underland, by Robert Macfarlane. What happens in the deep dark places beneath our feet? A lyrical work of non-fiction.
The Song of Achilles, by Madeline Miller. The love story between Achilles and Patroclus told with great gentleness and heart.
Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. An understated and masterful work of science fiction that explores themes of humanity, identity, friendship and love, among other things.
Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead. How can you write a heist novel that isn’t a heist novel but rather a story of a person, a time and place? Whitehead’s writing is exceptional, and Harlem Shuffle is just another proof of that.
The Expanse books 1-4, James S.A. Corey. I haven’t read book 5 and onwards yet, but I did read the first four books of The Expanse this year. They aren’t perfect (Holden is a bit much), but they are very good at world-building, with interesting and unique plots and complex and believable characters (apart from Holden, who is a bit much). The books are each written in a different style, and they improve with time.

In terms of art supplies, 2021 was the year of the super-granulating watercolours from Schmincke, and also when I added Daniel Smith watercolours to my palette. Schmincke just announced that the super-granulating colours will be permanently added to their offerings, and that they are issuing three more permanent sets into this series (Desert, Shire and Vulcano), and another limited edition set, Haze.

I’ll be talking about planning for 2022 on one of my next posts. In the meanwhile, have a great new year, and don’t forget to take time and breath.

Midori MD Notebook Journal A5 Review

I got this Midori MD Notebook Journal A5 Dot Grid as part of the Cult Pens Paper Box, which is no longer being offered. I’ve used and liked Midori paper before, as part of their Traveler’s Notebook offering, but I’ve never taken the opportunity to purchase one of their notebooks before. One of the main reasons I purchased the Paper Box was to give this notebook a try.

The MD Notebook Journal is a soft cover notebook with a minimalist design. It’s an A5 dot grid notebook that opens flat, has 192 fountain pen friendly pages, and comes with the bare minimum needed to turn it into a more structured journal: two enlarged dots for the dates and an index insert that you can use to mark the months. Everything you need to know about the notebook is thoughtfully written on its paper wrapper. Everything but the paper weight. I’d start a rant here, but I don’t think it will do something to solve the various standardization issues in the notebook/journal world, so I’m just going to note that I find it annoying. Write the gsm please. It’s not that hard.

MD Notebook Journal A5 back cover with index.

The MD Notebook Journal comes wrapped in a crinkly parchment paper that is meant to protect the cardboard covers, and I kind of liked the way that it felt. On a whim I grabbed some washi tape and taped it to the cover as a cover protector. I don’t know how long it will last (I’ll probably need to add more tape later on), but for now I’m enjoying it.

Inside the front cover is a place to write your details. As usual, I highly recommend writing your name and email, in case of loss.

The backend paper contains information about the notebook, and no pocket. It really isn’t missed on such a minimalist design, although you could easily tape an envelope here to serve as a pocket if you are so inclined.

The MD Notebook Journal paper is fountain pen friendly and shows off the various properties of fountain pen ink very well. The drying time isn’t great, but that’s to be expected considering the coating on the paper.
Now for a little side note: I purchased the 2021 Diamine Inkvent calendar and I plan on reviewing all of the inks in it, opening each one on the relevant day, just like I did in 2019. I’ll be using old Tomoe River Paper and this MD Notebook Journal for the purposes of the review. So if you want to see this notebook get a little more use before giving it a go, stay tuned.

Fountain pen friendly paper that shows sheen, shading and outlining well.

The paper in MD Notebook Journal isn’t very thick, so there is some show-through, but no bleed-through, with all the inks that I used. It wouldn’t bother me, but if you find show-through distracting, you might want to use lighter inks, fine and extra fine nibs, or just one side of the paper.

Show-through on the back side of the paper.

There’s a thin ribbon bookmark attached to the notebook, which is both charming and adds the only touch of colour (a lovely teal) to this minimalist journal.

I look forward to giving the Midori MD Notebook Journal A5 dot grid a thorough try out next month. From what I’ve seen of it so far it’s going to be a fun notebook to use (and I don’t even like dot grid notebooks normally). There’s something about the starkness of it that makes it appealing, in that it really is a sandbox that you can play in. I can imagine people placing it in various notebook covers, or covering the covers with stickers and drawings, or just trashing it with use.

A journal with endless potential and excellent paper – what more do you need?

Stormy Sea and Gonfu Tea

Today’s sketchbook page, as part of Liz Steel’s SketchingNow Sketchbook Design course.

Stillman and Birn Beta sketchbook, Schminke watercolours, Lamy fountain pens (Fine, Medium, 1.1 stub), vintage Eagle 4h pencil.

New Reading Journal

Yesterday I finished my fifth reading journal, and so I thought that it would be a good opportunity to write a post about how I set up my reading journal.

I use my reading journal to keep track of what I read and to encourage me to read more. This is the journal that I’ve just finished, a Moleskine Two-Go:

Moleskine Two-Go. The perfect size and format for my needs.

I used to use a Field Notes Arts and Sciences notebook for my reading journal, but once I got back to reading more it made sense to move to a larger journal. For the past three years I’ve used the Moleskine Two-Go, and I fill one book journal a year (70 books are logged in each notebook).

Start and end date for this reading journal.

This is the setup in my old reading journal. Three pages of index:

First index page. Red checkmarks for books that I’ve read.

The Moleskine Two-Go comes with pages that are blank on one side and lined on another, which is perfect for my use case, except for the second index page, which I need to rule myself:

I missed a line on the second index page, so the index numbering came out a little wonky. It’s only for me, so I don’t mind.

Here’s a sample of a complete page. I talked more about my thoughts behind the design in a previous post, but you can get the gist by looking at this sample. I like drawing something that captures the book for me on the opposite page, which is why I love the Moleskine Two-Go format.

I remember really not liking this book, and this is a reminder of why.

At the very last page of the journal I keep a log of how many books I read that month. It’s ten books so far for December, but the month isn’t done yet so that line isn’t filled.

Here is my new reading journal, a Moleskine Two-Go, this time in green (my previous ones were in light grey, dark grey and navy):

I love the texture of the fabric colours on this, and the shade of green is interesting. The two contrasting bookmarks and the endpapers are grey.

The first page, marking when I started the notebook and which journal number it is. This notebook doesn’t leave my desk yet I still write my name and email in case I misplace it somehow.

Next comes the index page. Since this is my third Two-Go reading journal I already know to number the pages until 139 (I number odd pages only, since my reviews are on odd pages), which comes out to 70 books.

I rule the second page, because I tried just winging it on the first year and it didn’t come out great.

On the last page I create my books per month tracker:

Zebra mildliner highligher smears gel ink, but I still like it.

I number all the pages of the index, but only the first 25 pages of the actual book journal. I will continue numbering pages in batches as I add books to the journal. The great advantage of using a completely unstructured book here is that I can do whatever I want with it, including starting the numbering after the index pages and not on the first notebook page.

These are the pen and pencils that I’ll be using in this journal. The Rotring 600 is a ballpoint, and the only ballpoint that I regularly use. The Caran d’Ache Bicolor has been my companion in these notebooks for several years. I use it to highlight things, and sometimes in my book scene sketches. I used the Blackwing 611 in my previous reading journal, and this time I’ll be using the Blackwing 4.

Caran d’Ache Bicolor, Blackwing 4, Rotring 600 ballpoint.

The first non fiction book in this journal:

The first fiction book in this journal:

Cloud Atlas. ToB means Tournament of Books.

That’s my new reading journal all set up and ready to go. I hope that this inspires you to keep a reading journal of your own, one that will encourage you to read more and help evoke the memories of reading a specific book.

Typewriters, pens, pins, and more.

My Pen Chalet exclusive Typewriter Retro 51s arrived this week, and the mint one is a perfect match to my Hermes Baby (and Hermes 2000) typewriter keys. I’m happy that I splurged on this pen and the copper Typewriter edition. They are both utterly unnecessary pens that make me smile without breaking the bank. I have 11 typewriters, but these are the first typewriter themed Retro51s that I’ve bought. I only slightly regret not getting the red one as well.

It was a virtual convention kind of fortnight, and in both cases the pandemic afforded me the opportunity to go to a convention that I normally wouldn’t have been able to attend. The fun and pretty well run one was the Disney Pin Trading 20th anniversary event. I’m not a huge Disney pin trader by far – I have pins from my Disney races and a few others that caught my eye, because I’m so aware of how easily I got fall down that rabbit hole. But I was curious enough about the behind the scenes of pin creation and well aware that is probably going to be my only chance to attend such an event that I enrolled. It was interesting and fun, and a generally well thought out event that didn’t feel like a “we’re doing the same thing only on zoom” kind of thing. I wish that I could say the same about Kubecon, the second convention that I attended. It’s a poster child of how not to run a virtual convention. Still I managed to learn quite a lot from the hours that I squeezed in, and I plan on catching up on more video sessions next week.

My first Disney Pin Trading Pins, from the DLP inaugural half-marathon weekend.

This weekend was stormy, so no long run today. I had about a month of perfect running weather so far, and it looks like I may yet make my 2020 running distance stretch goal of 700km run total this year.

In a fit of anger and frustration I created an “obituary” page for 2020 in my journal, but one that listed the bad moments of the year. It ended up taking four pages, but I managed to find something positive about most of the moments and events of the year, so it cheered me up.

TV (or streaming to be exact) has been one of the high points of the past few weeks. I don’t watch much of it, but “Ted Lasso”, and the new seasons of “The Mandalorian” and “Star Trek Discovery” have been great to watch. Also I’ve been playing “Pandemic Legacy Season Zero” and so far it’s excellent and distinctly different from its predecessors.

How I Journal: A Sample

I decided to upload the pages from my journal entry today, as a sample and perhaps an inspiration for anyone wondering what to journal about. There’s nothing big or grand here, no deep felt angst, just small observations about my day that will bring it back to life later on. I made an effort to make my handwriting neater than it usually is, and I cut out a page of what happened later in the afternoon as it involved a family member suffering an injury and getting hospitalized, and I want to protect their privacy. Otherwise it’s a fairly standard entry. What’s missing is a title (added after the entry is completed and in this case not something I want to share) that summarizes the day. Oftentimes I glue things in instead of drawing something, and sometimes I just write in a rush and the page is just dense, messy handwriting.

I use a Moleskine Large hardcover, in some limited edition or another (in this case Pokemon Charmander), and a gel pen of some kind or another. Today it was the Karas Kustoms Ink v2 rollerbal l with Uniball UMR-85, my favourite refill. I don’t mind the show through, it helps me get through the fear of the blank page, and there’s no other notebook that has the Moleskine cover and internal design, so after years of futilely trying to replace it with something else, I just shut out the voices of the detractors and allowed myself to enjoy what I love and what works for me. Please do the same.

Journalling in Difficult Times

I finished my Moleskine Sakura journal and started a Moleskine Pokemon Charizard journal a few days ago. It’s always fun to finish a journal, to have a beautiful physical object to hold in your hands, one that is heavy with words and memories.

Sakura on the left, Charizard on the right

I started the Sakura journal when we were already quarantined, and the world and my life were getting really strange and pretty stressful. I managed to journal every day until the end of June, which is when I broke my streak and my journaling habit started unravelling.

I love how chonky my finished journals are.

I usually finish a journal every 3 months or so. This one lasted for double that, because I barely journaled in July and August, and I didn’t journal at all in September. Every day I wanted to sit down and write, but I couldn’t face the added stress of the backlog that I felt the constant urge to make up for.

I stopped writing because of some serious family health issues, and I was so stressed out and tired during it all that I couldn’t pick up a pen at the end of the day and relive everything again. I knew that getting things out on paper would help, but I was overwhelmed.

In October I decided to give myself a break. Forget about the backlog. Leave those months empty, and move on. I went back to journalling, writing twice a day, every day for the past two weeks (once at the tail end of my morning routine, and once before I go to sleep). I also don’t care if I filled two pages (as was my usual standard), a page and a half, or half a page. I write about the little things in my life, and really try to keep it positive, to make journalling a joy again, a point of escape, and not another “let’s enumerate the ways in which the world is terrible these days” exercise. I have enough of that on social media. So far it’s working and I’m having fun. Will it last? I hope so. If not, I’ll take a break and get back to it later. The point is that I’m no longer willing to let journalling become a stressor in my life. It’s either something I enjoy, or something that I don’t do.

Writing at Large

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