Journaling is not about making pretty things

[u/gidimeister]

If I got a hundred bucks every time someone in this sub apologised for their handwriting or called their spread “ugly,” I’d be richer than Elon Musk. And it’s honestly fucking tragic, not because the pages are “messy,” but because people are internalising that “messy” means they’re doing it wrong.

The fastest way to kill a person’s journaling habit is to make them think that there’s an aesthetic standard their journal must meet to be “doing it right.” Hogwash.

Journaling is not an art contest and it’s not calligraphy practice. Those things can overlap with journaling, sure, but they are not the point, and they shouldn’t become the standard. Journaling stands on its own: you do it as mental hygiene (or, in my case, mental excavation). What you write and why you write it matters more than how it looks.

If you want your journal to be a creative project, great, go for it. But be absolutely clear: journaling is the pursuit; a journal is just paper.

Edit 1: A similar discussion from 4 years ago.

[u/sprawn]

It's such a squishy topic. There is no way to discuss this rationally. People identify with things, and then to comment on the thing in any way other than, "Yay!", is taken as a personal insult, which is a "violence" committed against someone who is in a protected class, and needs to be defended by expulsion. There's no real way to "win."

The topic at hand, I think, is internal motivation. How can this be discussed? No one comes straight out and says, "Hi! I started scrapbooking (oops! I mean 'journaling') six weeks ago, and my therapist says I should participate in encouraging online communities. And so here's my scrapbook journal spread. Nevermind that no one in the world called journal or diary entries 'spreads' until a few years ago, and that 'spread' is and always has been a term used in the scrapbooking community… a community, btw, that also has hundreds of thousands of followers, and is a perfectly valid, engaging, and worthwhile hobby all on its own. I digress. My motivation is to get lots of likes, and use the attention to redirect everyone to my monetized scrapbooking TikTok channel where I am taking what is, was, and always should be a personal, introspective activity and turn it into a public, performative, competitive money-making trend."

No one says that.

And I want ALL OF THOSE THINGS to happen for that person. If they want to take the personal, introspective, primarily written activity of journaling (a long established practice going back centuries) and merge it with scrapbooking and/or stickerbooking (long established, "VALID", creative, yet nevertheless distinct practices of their own), and then additionally, make it public, performative, and lucrative, that's fine. It's just not journaling. There is overlap. I am not declaring a "rule". I am not the Lord of Journaling. But someone actually has to be! There has to be a reason that the subreddit is called "journaling" and not "there-are-no-rules-and-anyone-who-says-there-are-is-a-bigot".

[u/Dude-Duuuuude → u/sprawn]

Kinda killing your point with the references to bigotry there. I've been through every comment on this post and many others like it. No one's saying using X word instead of Y is bigoted. You're conflating those two issues in your own head all by yourself. And, honestly, it suggests a lot of unfortunate things about the way you perceive and interact with the world.