Journaling: How do I start?

Lise Walsh from The Sweetest Folk shares her thoughts on putting pen to paper.

Now I have my fancy new dot grid journal, with its thick, luscious pages and it’s soft tactile cover that makes me want to pick it up and revel in its perfect beauty. 

Now what?

I am currently at that stage of paralysis, and I have unfortunately been here for a while now.  The kind of paralysis that stops me from moving forward because I don’t want to mess things up.  As it is, everything is so perfect and clean. What if I ruin this beautiful journal?

Firstly, I can say with absolute certainty – I won’t ruin anything. The good thing about a journal is it is 100% me and with that, whatever I choose to do will be perfect – for me.  And the more I do, the more I learn and the more I figure out just what is my style, my look and what I want my journal to hold.  Without starting I will never know what it can become.

With that in mind, here’s how I got out of paralysis and got ink on the page.

1.  I treated myself to one special pen.  The kind of pen that makes you write just to experience how the ink feels on the thick, smooth paper. 

2.  I left a few pages in the front of the journal blank to keep that clean look visible until I was ready to create something I really wanted to see when I opened my journal each day.

3. I put pen to paper and just started doodling.  As a creative, my head is always swirling with new ideas, brand names and logos – so I started there.

4.  I found a quote to inspire me and got a feel for what type of fonts and lettering I was naturally good at.  I used some colour which gave me a lovely sense of calm.

5. I’m an avid list writer – so I created some lists. 

6.  My day job is as a recipe developer, and I think about food…ALL…THE ….TIME  so that was a great place to flow to next. Recipes, ideas, ingredient lists.

7.  I jotted down some more ideas.  An energy tracker, a birthday calendar and must watch list of tv shows (to binge of course) and before you know it I couldn’t stop journaling.

I had broken the spell and created something that was uniquely mine, not perfect, but mine.

So in short, you need to just start and enjoy watching yourself get carried away.