Lol, Turns Out I Journal After All

I Swore I Would Never Be That Girl

I have spent years rolling my eyes at the mere mention of journalling. You know the ones. The Moleskine girlies. The rose gold pens. The morning pages. The tea-stained paper and affirmations in cursive. That wasn’t me. That couldn’t be me. I was far too chaotic, too inconsistent, too emotionally allergic to anything that looked like structure.

I’ve openly mocked journalling like it was a personal enemy. Like it keyed my favourite stilettos* and ghosted me after three dates. I’ve told anyone who would listen that writing down your feelings was just a fast-track to spiralling. That it felt like homework for people with too many thoughts and too much time. Give me wine and voice notes, not bullet points and prompts.

But you know what? I was wrong. Like, wildly, embarrassingly, hilariously wrong. Because guess what I’ve been doing on my laptop at 11:42pm with a glass of Pinot Noir and a sheet mask on? That’s right. Clickety-clackety journalling. Turns out what I actually hated wasn’t journalling…

It was handwriting.

*I don’t have a car, so bear with me here, ok?

Typing My Feelings Like a Professional Oversharer

The second you give me a keyboard, I turn into some kind of emotional court stenographer. I can write pages. I can process. I can word vomit with punctuation and dramatic paragraph breaks. I will absolutely sit in the dark with my laptop balanced on one knee and process an entire emotional breakdown with a 900-word stream-of-consciousness essay titled “Maybe I Wasn’t The Problem, But Also Maybe I Was*.”

The joy of typing? My brain moves fast, and my fingers can keep up. Unlike pen and paper where I get halfway through a sentence and forget what I was going to say. Typing lets me be dramatic, unfiltered, raw and overanalytical. A win, if you ask me. Not to mention I can backspace anything too unhinged, which feels like self-editing in real time.

Turns out journalling isn’t about the format. It’s about the expression. You can voice note. You can type. You can use a Sharpie and cardboard if that’s your thing. All that matters is getting it out. And once I reframed it like that, I realised I’ve been journalling for years. Emails to myself. Notes apps full of cryptic heartbreak rambles. Even these blog posts.

Babe. I am a journal.

*brb, writing this right now.

You Can’t Heal What You Won’t Let Out

I used to think journalling would just make things worse, that writing down my thoughts would give them more power. Like naming the demon, you know? But what actually happens is… they lose their bite. The second I type out, “I’m scared no one will ever love me like that again,” it stops haunting me. It becomes a sentence. A thought. A little guy in a textbox instead of a monster under my bed.

And sometimes, journalling doesn’t even feel deep. Sometimes it’s just:

“I want chips.”
“I miss the thought of him.”
“Why did I eat four pieces of toast when I wasn’t hungry?”
“Damn, I look good when I cry.”

That’s all valid. That’s all journalling. It doesn’t have to be profound. It doesn’t have to follow a template. You don’t need a question prompt about your inner child’s moon sign. Just write something. Anything. As long as it’s yours.

Some of my best emotional breakthroughs have come from what started as a petty little rant. I’ll be mid-tantrum via voice note, and suddenly unlock a childhood wound. I didn’t mean to. I was just annoyed that Brad didn’t hold the door for me, despite be being right there. But now I’m crying and connecting dots and writing metaphors like it’s a live poetry slam. Healing is weird like that.

Journal Like a Psycho, Heal Like a Goddess

Once you let go of the idea that journalling has to be calm and pretty, you open up a whole new chaotic world. Screaming into a voice note while driving? Journalling. Writing a Google Doc titled “Why I Hate Everything Today”? Journalling. Cutting out magazine headlines and gluing them into an A4 page like you’re planning a ransom? Also journalling.

Your journal doesn’t have to look like Pinterest. It doesn’t need to smell like lavender. It doesn’t have to be legible or nice or grammatically correct. It just needs to be you. Loud, messy, soft, unhinged. Whatever you need it to be that day. That’s the beauty of it. It changes with you.

And no, you don’t need to do it every day. You don’t need to make it a habit. You don’t need to feel bad when you skip it. Just know it’s there when you need it. Like a keyboard-shaped therapist that won’t charge you $180 a session to say “and how did that make you feel?”

My Name’s Bry Jaimea and I Journal Now

So yes. I take it all back. I do journal. I just had to find my way of doing it. I’m not a page-a-day diary kind of girl. I’m more of a ranty brain-dump with a side of Google Docs and 2am existential crises. But it works. It clears space. It gives the chaos somewhere to go. It lets me feel without spiralling.

And if that’s not healing, I don’t know what is.

So here’s your permission slip: you don’t have to love journalling. You don’t even have to call it that. Just let it be a tool. A release. A clickety-clack moment of clarity. Whether it’s typed, spoken, scribbled or screamed into a pillow, let it move. That’s all that matters.

Now excuse me while I go rename my Notes folder from “Chaos” to “Emotional Mastery Vol. 1” because apparently I’m a journaler now. Who knew?

We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity

In today's episode of Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity, we're unpacking why we need to stop clapping for basic decency. You know the script. A man texts back within twenty-four hours and we're screenshotting it to the group chat. A man plans a date more than three hours in advance and we call him a unicorn. A man manages to listen, pay attention, and behave like a fully formed adult, and our nervous systems short-circuit because we genuinely don't know how to receive it.Here's the truth nobody is saying out loud. The bar has been dragged so low that Satan himself needs a chiropractor after a competitive round of limbo. We've been culturally trained to be grateful for behaviour that should not require gratitude. We've been told these things are bonuses when they're actually the entry requirement. And in the meantime, women have been quietly doing the basic decency thing forever, without applause, while men get standing ovations for outputs we generated for them.Today we're talking about why a great man is genuinely just an average woman, who benefits when the bar stays low, the invisible labour women have been performing for free for centuries, and the friend-test that cuts straight through every excuse we've ever made for mediocre men. Let's get into it.For more visit BryJaimea.com or follow over on IG @BryJaimea

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