First Thoughts Journal

As part of my Journey in Literature class I was assigned to keep a journal where I had to practice an activity named First Thoughts.  Since the beginning of the semester I’ve been writing in it and by this time I have over 40 entries, each of which shows a certain aspect of myself.  A first characteristic that we can evaluate its change during the course of these past months is the structure of my writing.  At the beginning of the semester my entrees were perfectly aligned paragraphs.  My writing was very structured and as time went passing by, my writing got freer, being a little more unorganized and the general appearance of my entrees was more careless.  Another change that I observed when analyzing my journal entrees was that I progressively crossed out lesser words.  By the end of my journal I can say that there was no crossing out at all.  Amongst other changes there is the growth of my handwriting which to me reflects too the letting go of my consciousness.

First thoughts activity is characterized by certain rules and/or limits.  Evaluating my journal in the context of those guidelines I can state that it was hard following them at the beginning, but it got better with time.  Trying not to stop my hand was the most difficult of all; after 5 or 7 minutes I became to conscious of it and the temptation to stop invaded me.  Crossing out and not worrying about spelling and grammar were rules that I wasn’t able to follow them during my first tries of journal entries, but I can really say that from the very half of my journal I just let go and stuck to those rules.  In general I can say that not being logical of what I was writing and going for the jugular did went really easy and most of the time it helped me discover things of myself I didn’t know.

Another exercise that we had to do was a life compass, every once in a while, where we examined ourselves in a mental, spiritual, emotional and physical way.  Throughout my whole journal I only did three compasses, in part I think it was because I didn’t want to face the lack of overall wellbeing I’ve been having during the semester.  The pattern showed through all of my compasses was that I started the semester with lots of energy and connection to my spirituality and emotions, but as the semester developed, the stress and overwhelmingness took control of myself and my balance was lost.  Because of the “chaos” that college work and other requirements bring to my life, my scores on the compasses got lower and lower each and every time (no wonder why I started avoiding it haha).

As I already stated, the writing of this journal helped me discover things about myself that I didn’t know.  The writing process made me realize how fortunate I am for having such a supportive and loving family.  Whenever I went for the jugular I was able to appreciate that not everyone is as fortunate as we may be and that we have to let those around us know how grateful we are of them.  Writing this journal also helped me see how much of a stressful person I can be.   During my journey writing this journal I figured out that I am constantly overthinking my performance in college assignments and tests and always expecting the worse results.  Whenever I noticed that I was overwhelming myself with stress through my writings, I tried to have a mini getaway to relieve my anxiety and do better in life.

Here I include pictures of my journal, whose decorations represent my inner and external journeys until right before beginning my writing process with it.