Writing Through the Hard Days
Okay. How are you doing this week, actually?
Not the hallway version. If this week has had a hard day in it, or a hard anniversary, or just a day where everything felt like too much, I want to talk about that today, because your notebook can hold that too. It doesn't have to be pretty in there.
I'll tell you where I land on this: some of my most useless notebook time has come from trying to write in a way that felt worthy of the moment instead of just writing.
Patrick got me a leather notebook for Christmas a few years back. Beautiful thing. Soft cover, ribbon bookmark, the kind of notebook that looks like it belongs to someone with their life together. I sat down with it after a rough shift, pen in hand, and could not make myself put a word on the page. Six weeks it sat there almost empty. Every time I opened it I thought, this page deserves better than what I've got today. So I'd close it again.
Went back to a spiral notebook from the checkout aisle at Macey's. Ninety-nine cents, ugly cover, probably has a coupon smashed in the spine somewhere. Words came right back the next morning. Turns out I didn't need a better notebook. I needed one that couldn't judge me.
I bring that up here specifically because hard days are exactly when that pressure shows up worst. You've had an awful day, or it's a date on the calendar that still stings, and some part of you thinks the writing about it needs to rise to the occasion. It doesn't. The cheaper and plainer the notebook, the easier it is to just get the ugly stuff out without an audition process first.
So here's what I'd actually do on a hard day.
Pick up whatever notebook is closest. Not the nice one, if you have a nice one — that one can wait for later. Set a timer for five minutes, or don't time it at all if that adds pressure you don't need right now.
Write what's true. Not what's useful, not what's grateful, not what would look okay if somebody read it. If the day was rotten, write rotten. If you're angry, let it be angry on the page instead of angry in your shoulders all day. If you don't have full sentences in you, write fragments. Nobody's grading the grammar. Mine wouldn't pass anyway.
If you get stuck, here are a few doors in, pick whichever one opens: - "Today was hard because..." - "What I wish someone would say to me right now is..." - "I don't want to write about this, but..."
That last one has gotten more real writing out of me than almost any prompt I've tried.
And if you truly cannot finish the thought, stop. Leave it unfinished. I've got an entry in one of my old notebooks that's a letter to my mom that just stops mid-sentence, because I couldn't get through it that night. I never went back and finished it. I look at that blank space now and it tells me something the words never could have. Sometimes the stopping point is part of the entry.
A real caution here, plainly: if writing about something hard starts to feel like it's pulling you under instead of letting something out, put the pen down. Go for a walk, call somebody, get outside for a minute even if it's cold and dry and awful up the canyon this time of year. Journaling is not therapy and I'm not a therapist. It's a place to put things down, not a place to sit in them for hours. If a hard day keeps being a hard month, please talk to an actual person who's trained for that. I mean that plainly, not as a disclaimer to cover myself.
One more thing. You do not have to write about the hard day the day it happens. Last year was the first time I sat down and wrote through the anniversary of my mom's death instead of just gritting my teeth and getting through it like I usually do. I didn't do it that morning. I did it that evening, once I had some quiet. It didn't fix the day. It didn't make the day easier, honestly. But it gave the day somewhere to go instead of just sitting in my chest until bedtime. That's the whole opinion I've got on hard days: you don't owe the page a good mood, and you don't owe it good timing either.
Before next time: if a hard day shows up this week, big or small, try grabbing the cheapest notebook in the house and giving it five honest minutes. If nothing hard shows up, heck yes, enjoy that, and I'll see you next week. 🌞