A rough patch last semester led Heather Zamot to discover the wonders of daily journaling in her path to self-improvement.

By A. Gaytan

“I love journaling because it really really helps me like process everything,” said Zamot. “I write about my days no matter how big or how small.”

College can often be stressful for many students and Zamot found herself going through a rough patch last semester. Struggles in her personal life and in her courses led to a period in which she felt she lost herself. This reached a climax when Zamot took her once incredibly long hair and cut it shorter than she ever had, even going so far as to dye it a different color.

Throughout these few months, one of the activities she discovered and soon found to be a comfort was journaling. Sitting down in an enclosed place with white noise or classical music as her companion, Zamot finds it healing to write about her thoughts, feelings, and the general events in her daily life.

When she first began this activity, Zamot turned to Pinterest for ideas on how to format her journal. Despite trying a lot of the suggestions such as bullet journaling or journals that came with questions and prompts to fill in, she admits to preferring free verse and typically buys journals with up to 200 blank pages for her to write whatever she wants in. 

Zamot describes the structure of other methods of journaling to be too restrictive which makes it harder for her to write her feelings and emotions. Instead, free verse helps her internally by allowing her to pour all her energy out with it.

“I don’t know the chemistry or how it works but when I write, with every sentence I literally feel the emotion leaving my body,” said Zamot. “All the energy I let out, whether it’s positive or negative, it’s on the paper and not in my body anymore

The selectiveness in how she chooses to journal doesn’t just end with what journal she uses. When she first started journaling, a lot of the pens Zamot used wrote lighter or thicker than others which left her with a desire for consistency and smoothness in her pens. She ordered different pens from Amazon to find out which type best worked for her and stumbled upon gel velocity pens. 

The softness, smoothness, and lack of smudging when it came to writing with gel velocity pens meant she quickly fell in love with this specific kind. She has many of them, mostly with black ink, but also decided to buy a variety of different colors to not limit herself when it came to her writing. Zamot tends to alternate the pen color she uses from day to day based on what she’s feeling at the moment. 

Currently, Zamot has found it difficult to balance daily journaling with her packed schedule this semester as an English major. This means she often has to skip journaling for a day or two to focus on her assignments and coursework. 

In spite of this, she commits to never skipping more than two days of writing and has even begun experimenting with junk journaling. The more she commits herself to journaling, the more connected Zamot feels to her emotions and her work on improving herself.

“I’ve been working on myself through journaling and, honestly, I feel so much better from last semester,” Zamot said. “It doesn’t matter if someone says that’s cheesy or that’s stupid, it’s something personal to me that I really love and it’s helping me heal through everything.”