As a writer and a lifelong eager student of writing, psychology and the social sciences, I’ve kept a journal all my life, as far back as I can remember. I was always excited by the potential of the fresh new journal pages, waiting for my life to open up in front of me. In my journal, my writing voice and sense of identity had a space where they could be understood and appreciated. My journal was the one who listened to my active mind, who could reflect and give back to me the truth of who I was. These books were my place to organize my thoughts, and my safe place to explore the edges of all that I was learning and coming to understand.

I kept a few of those journals and when I was reading over them recently I was disappointed by them. It was as if I had no belief in my future self. My early journals had no structure, no organization and no consideration that in the future I would want to read them. The words filled the entire page with no margins or white space, as if I was really short of paper. There were no subject headings, and only occasional dates, and all kinds of material were mixed up together, such as ideas for stories or anecdotes or fragments of dreams. There are two time focuses in a journal — the time when you write and the time when you return to read or review what you have written and take it forward — and I did not take this into account.

WHY I BELIEVE IN MODERN JOURNALLING

I believe everyone has original, unique, quirky, special and unusual ideas, and some special thoughts, experiences or understandings that belong only to them. If you do not express them, then no one else ever will. There are things you have known or loved or understood in your own special way since you were a young child, and these will have been amplified in certain unique ways by your life experience. I also believe we tend towards social conformity, and we have a kind of herd instinct to fit in rather than stand out, like the wildebeest on the plains. If they all run like crazy at the same time in the same direction across the same crossing point on the river, only a few, the unlucky ones, get eaten by crocodiles or big cats. This conformity prevents a lot of us from freely expressing our weirdest and most private thoughts. If you watch a film of the wildebeest doing this, don’t you just want to urge them on? And you get anxious about any straggler who’s sniffing out what might be a better and safer crossing point, but she’s hesitating because all the others are getting in the water and it’s safer to go with the herd. Part of our social brain stil