How To Turn Your Journal Into a Life Story

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The mind is a bullshit machine.

It pats itself on the back for losing. It feels ashamed when it makes progress, and it claims to want one thing while secretly desiring another.

In other words, we’re all balls of contradictions, and there’s no way we can sort through this mess in our own heads. This is why self-understanding has been a major theme in all philosophical traditions and literature. These books and treatises help us to externalise our internal thinking. They reflect different aspects of ourselves through characters, stories, and events, so that, over time, we can piece together an image of who we are from shared narratives.

But no story could capture who we are perfectly. In fact, if we identify with a story too much, too early, we’ll fall prey to stereotypes and playact our way into another person’s idea of who we are. So, the best bet against inaccurate self-perception is to pull out a pen, dig in, and write your own story. Here are some of the protocols that’ll help you do just that.

Protocol #1: Start From the Premise That You Don’t Know Who You Are

For a while, I always found it hard to write whatever came to mind. I always felt like someone’s watching me over my shoulder, so I wrote with a forced consistency lest someone call out: “wait, you said something completely different yesterday”. But whenever this happens, I remind myself that: