Why journal

[meirwen_1988]

I've been working on a project now, trying to set up a journaling unit for my Fall semester students. As part of it I'd like them to read about why journaling can be a choice, not an assignment, so I was hoping some of my fellow bloggers would post (either as comments to this post, or in their own journals) about why they journal, and maybe about how they choose who gets to read what they write.

I'd like to be able to cut and paste parts for my students to read, though. I would give authorial credit to your LJ name, in which case I'll use Anon.</>

Thanks.

Comments

Use as you wish...

[svan-1004.livejournal.com]

Why Journal?
Simply to keep track of life.
My Life.
My friends lives.
Actions, Sayings. Important events such as our return to space only to later have our fleets grounded.
It has become important to me to have one location where I can keep such activities. It allows for reflection days, months, and years later.
It allows for personal gauging of growth and even skills.
Some days the journaling is abysmal. Other days… It is inspiring.
I have used journaling to put down my feelings during Fire and ambulance calls. It has allowed me to organize my thoughts and to do a form of personal debriefing.
A Journal can be for any reason you want it to be. It just has to be.

Filtering.
1. To not offend those who would not understand where I was coming from.
2. So I do not fill up their pages with events such as… “I fed the cat today. Meow.”
3. certain activities relate to different sets of friends. I have a couple filters. One for friends within one hobby and another for all those in Ambulance or Fire departments.
4. some things are private. Everyone has thoughts or feelings at one time or another that should never be made public. To anyone. I use a PRIVATE setting to handle these.

Sure!

[gwendolyngrace.livejournal.com]

I don't journal much (obviously) and I never have. I used to hate the assignments in school where we were required to keep diaries and make entries every day. I still go for very long stretches without journaling. I think I like my memories transient.

However, I use LJ as a way to communicate with friends, hopefully many friends, at one time. I post fiction to my journal, mostly of the fanfic variety, as I actually nurse hopes that anything original I could come up with might actually be publishable - hah, hah. But I keep that stuff out of the public view, anyway, just in case. And I use it to share other things - treatises, articles, funnies - with people, as I find blogging that stuff a lot less invasive than spamming everyone on an email distribution list.

Mostly, I see blogging as a highly different act from journaling. Journaling, to me, has always been about exploring one's inner voice and using the internal monologue to sort out and capture the myriad facets of one's consciousness. I don't really need to indulge in an inner exploration very often - I find that I'm usually pretty capable of sorting out my Id from my Ego all by myself, thanks, and if I do need to talk it out, I usually want to talk to someone else, not just myself. (I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've used my own journal for this.)

Blogging, however, is a different animal because unless you lock down those types of posts and make them private or tightly friends-locked, you're setting all that out there in public. I think the second or third entry in my journal was a rant I posted when I forgot - oops - that LJ's are public, unless you set them not to be. I don't like the idea of blogging so that only one set of friends can see it, which is another reason I'm generally selective about what I blog. In fact, the only times I really filter is if there's something I need to tell people, but don't want *everyone* to know. For example, I set up a filter when a friend's mother died, to try to coordinate something for the family. I have some filters by interest, but I generally don't use them much.

There are the posts one makes in order to preserve a record of something someone saw, overheard, etc. - and I would say that this is the primary reason I blog for personal purposes, other than archiving fiction and the like.

[sokmunky.livejournal.com]

Journaling and blogging are different. To me, journaling implies a private action, and blogging is public. In other words, journaling involves the use of pen and paper, or files not published on the net. Blogging, even under a privacy filter, is still public. Filtering implies privacy, but anything on the web is available to someone.

Journaling is an activity that expands. Writing down your daily thoughts and actions allows you to evaluate situations and make decisions. It can be used to modify behavior, plan for the future, track your dreams, fantasize, document conversations, think.

Blogging contracts life. It makes opinions and stories from everywhere available here and now. It's like a million people standing on soapboxes, screaming out their importance at the top of their lungs. You get to choose who you listen to, but you really can't choose who listens to you.

[dwolfhunter.livejournal.com]

Why do I journal/blog, whatever? I suppose that I have always felt the innate need to express myself in words. But I have always lacked the glib, articulate way of speaking that allowed me to say why I feel the way I feel without being hurtful or seeming angry. I've discovered that what I write is a better barometer for what's going on in my mind than what I say.
As to why I do not filter...I believe that I should be totally candid somewhere. I have chosen my journals for that purpose. Thus, there is no earthly reason to lie in my journal. One might argue that the revelations of myself that I put down here are public and sometimes far too personal to be publicly consumed. I prefer to see it as "drawing the line in the sand".
I say what I have to say and challenge others to comment or to contradict. I'm a very confrontational person...this is an adequate form of conflict, for now.