Journaling through a Pandemic on unwiredcouch.com

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Style Pass

2021-08-02 09:30:04

I started 2020 with a very different expectation of the year to come. And I think it’s safe to say that I’m not alone in that one. But fast-forward 3 months and I found myself in the middle of a lockdown and a pandemic. Everyone is at home all the time, it’s working from home all the time, no coffee shops, no meeting friends, and that for the foreseeable future. The days are fairly unstructured and pretty chaotic as we try to make the best of this situation. In which I found myself really embracing journaling into various paper notebooks and it has made a tremendous difference for my mental health.

Towards the end of 2019 I had bought a “Some lines a day” journal from Leuchtturm1917. And while at the beginning of the year, I wasn’t too sure what to put it in there, and lots of entries were just of the “had coffee today and got some stuff done” variety. I now really appreciate having this low-pressure prompt to get my thoughts out of my brain every morning.

The way the journal is designed is that it has 365 pages, one page per day. The pages are then divided into 5 parts so that the book can be used for 5 years. Once you’re through with the first year, you can see what you wrote in the year(s) before when getting to subsequent entries. It’s basically an analog version of the “On this day” feature you can find in every photo and journaling app these days.