Narrating Your Growth: Lifelong Lessons from Keeping a Journal The Developmental

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Saturday, 20th of February 1999. 11pm
“I have long worried that if I were to lay down my thoughts in the pages of a journal that would give anyone a gateway into my most intimate musings, and I was afraid to risk it. Until now… I do believe that writing will give my future self an opportunity to go back in time, to re-live the past, to understand it not just with the mind of my future self, but through the eyes of my present self.
Perhaps time will make my memories fade and my grown up self will look back on my teenage years with a completely different perception than my own right now. I’m hoping this journal, which I am starting tonight, will help me better understand my own children when they get to the age I am now. Perhaps it will help future me bridge the ‘generation gap’ …”
This is the first entry in my first-ever journal. I started it when I was 16. My worry that my parents would read it was smaller than my worry that unless I did write, I would forever lose the memory of my teenage self and, with it, the proof that I had looked at the world in ways that seemed incomprehensible to the grown-ups around me at the time.
Through my eyes, adults seemed to be afflicted with a strange sort of amnesia, that had erased any trace of their 16 year-old-selves and made them incapable of understanding the anxieties, passions and visceral intensity of regular teenagers like me. The thought I would one day forget too was terrifying. The journal was an attempt to hold my future self to account, but also my best shot at looking out for the children I knew I would raise someday. I didn’t want them to ever feel as disconnected from or misunderstood by the adult world as I did back then.
That first journal evolved into over a dozen notebooks, spanning 24 years of my life and keeping a record of my becoming. Journaling became the one habit I was able to maintain through life’s highs and lows. I journaled through joy, hope, my first love, through my first heartbreak. I journaled through the death of loved ones, through divorce, through professional highs and the depths of despair. I’ve journaled about dreams that seemed impossible and then came true and journaled through failure and pain.
I’ve journaled when pregnant - when I got to re-read my earliest journals and cry in gratitude for the priceless gift my 16-year-old self had left me. It’s a gift that to this day is helping me be a more conscious mother and keeps amnesia at bay. When my daughter turns 16, I’ll likely share my journals with her and let her make sense of them for herself. Perhaps my own 16-year-old will be a better partner for her at that stage than my middle-aged self. I also secretly hope she’ll start her own journal one day. I’m pretty sure I’ll be journaling for as long as my mind can reflect and my hands able to write. I’m looking forward to adding another shelf for my journals and, in the process, stepping through life as consciously as I possibly can.
I have come to consider this one of the simplest and most powerful developmental practices and credit it for much of my growth. I deeply wish more people considered making it part of their lives. And here’s my case for why.
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Over the years I’ve shared my love of journaling with countless teams and leaders. I’ve met people who had experienced the benefits of the practice themselves and were true believers. I’ve met many others who believed it might be useful but were convinced they could never muster the