Sharon Vs Journal: Who Comes Out On Top?

Written by Sharon Hamza

Image courtesy of Wonder Forest

I have had a personal battle with journaling for quite some time.

I’ve tried journaling before as a hobby, and because it’s a trendy thing to do, but I always either forget to continue or give up because I hate the way my handwriting looks. I know that it’s supposed to be a relaxing, anxiety-reducing activity but unfortunately for me, it is everything but that! I began to think of my inability to write reflexively as innate, one of those things I just can’t change about myself. Luckily, over the past months, I’ve started to make sense of my doubts through my love of studying sociology.

One of my biggest takeaways from my studies was, during one of my classes on identity formation, that there was a larger difference between the“ self” and“ subjectivity. I  thought I was already aware of these terms: the self is who I truly am, and subjectivity is the outlook on life that I chose to align with, right? Well, not quite. I have come to understand the self as being an unconscious trained freedom, choice and agency. How can I be truly sure of my“ self” if the self constantly in a state of being influenced? This question leans into the topic of subjectivity, which refers to the many factors that influence your identity. Reflecting on this, I drew links to intersectionality, looking at how I have experienced life as a self-identifying Black woman may be familiar to others who identify similarly. However, I felt as though by thinking of my self identity in a monolithic way was reductive of my being. While, I can recognise the interplay of structural factors on how the“ self” is constructed, I don’t necessarily agree that I am a being of subjectivity; I don’t believe I am as radical to completely think of myself as free from these factors either. It’s a sort of internal struggle where my feelings of independence and free spirit are mushed up into a small ball and launched right at a large brick wall. For me, this brick wall was journaling and as strange as it may seem, at the time I felt as though journaling had to be an accurate representation of yourself. So at a time in my life where the definition of who“ Sharon” was, beyond the superficial, journaling was like having to confront my identity and unravel the deeper layers of my“ self”. 

At this point in my research, I was discouraged about my capacity to“ go against the grain”, and stand out and be“ unique.” When I bought my first journal, I went all out. I bought a cute Moleskin diary, Mildliner Zebra highlighters and an insane amount of stickers. Why? Because of my Pinterest mood board, of course. I have included some of my several pins of different coloured pages, with aesthetic colours and handwriting; that was what I wanted to emulate. I wanted to be“ unique”.

I put that in quotation marks because I have always been somewhat skeptical about the idea of uniqueness. From a young age, we, as a population of people,  have always been told to“ think outside the box”, and when we do we’re usually met with praise and awarded with compliments like“ Oh wow, you’re so different.” For me, I used to see uniqueness as a measure of intelligence but without realising it I actually began to strive for uniqueness by immersing myself in niches that I saw other unique people do or had. My idea of what it meant to stand out from the crowd was to follow the small crowd that stood out before me! If we are all told to be blue in a sea of red, to what extent do we become the same colour, just in different shades? When I look back on my mood boards, I realise that they were actually all the same. The same pretty handwriting, the same pastel colours, the same to-do-lists. When I realised this, I thought to myself that all the representations of journaling I had swamped my Pinterest feed with, were not reflections of me. I had the power to make journaling whatever I wanted it to be. By doing this, journaling can become a mirror of myself, whether it be messy or neat. Both are valid representations. 

I have been socialised to always do something that is worth my time and energy. I never gave time to journaling, but why do I have to see time as something that is given away? Within neoliberal structures, time is commodified and treated as something that should be“ spent.” So my reluctance to write in this way has probably been motivated by my learned perception of time and the fear of not making a“ proper investment.”

I have seen uniqueness as a competition that I have failed miserably at, and we live in a context where failure is seen as being next to death. The neoliberal subject yearns for success and perfection, and I can recognise those desires within myself. My desire to be perfect at journaling ultimately drove me away from it for fear of failing to do it the way I have seen it done. Failure is the complete antithesis of the neoliberal subject. I relate quite strongly as I often find myself striving so hard for success that the idea of failure is suffocating. In this way, I saw journaling as a linear thing, clear cut and put together: an aestheticised version of myself on paper. But now, I really don’t have to be scared of failing or scared of uniqueness. I see that there is so much more value in the messy, in the non-linear and I have come to embrace those attributes in myself.

Now that I think about it, this whole blog piece could very well be a journal entry. Maybe I will pick up my Moleskin journal and write however I want, with whatever colours I want. 

Sharon - 1   Journaling - 0