Journaling Helps Me Deal With Depression & Memory Loss — It Can Help You Too

Daily journaling is the habit that keeps on giving and can make a real difference in your recovery.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

I’m used to being forgetful. I’ve spent years coming up with solutions for all the things I kept forgetting.

Then I started forgetting parts of my life.

A few years back, my husband and I were rearranging all our digital files and discovered some pictures from around 18 years ago. I recognized myself and my kids in the pictures, but I remembered nothing else about them — the people, the place, nothing.

Just the Wake Up Call I Needed

I realized that I needed to get a handle on how I tracked my memories, my emotions, and my life.

I started bullet journaling and that helped my day-to-day memory issues. I’d always kept a personal journal, but I wasn’t consistent. Once I decided it was important, I made it part of my morning routine. My practice is similar to writing ‘morning pages’ like Julia Cameron suggests in her book, The Artist’s Way (Except I rarely hit three pages).

I started to journal every day.

I’d write about the things I remembered and the things I forgot, trying to put some order to the chaos in my mind.

I realized the depth of my memory loss went beyond the memories that fade as you get older. Instead, I was losing memories of events I knew happened (and even had pictures of):

• my wedding day
• the birth of my boys (with just a couple exceptions).

Big events happened, but I was left staring at pictures with no memories beyond those snapshots.

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me.

― Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Consistent Journaling Led to Healing and Growing Beyond Memory Loss