Inner Feedback

Men have put personal thoughts to paper for several centuries now, producing everything from great novels to embarrassing diary entries. Here's why I began the practice of journalling and how it made me a better ally to myself

- Sharan Sanil

There's a curious video from 2022 where Hugh Jackman - the Aussie gigachad himself - breaks down a surprisingly delicate recount of his experience with personal journals. "It was a bit of homework, and I sort of went, 'Journaling, ugh," admitted the X-Men star. "And now every morning I do it, obsessively, because I realised how stunted I was... I would write 'confused' a lot, and my therapist said, "Confused: That's a red flag." Apart from smirking to myself at how much Jackman probably paid his therapist to tell him that being 'confused' is bad, there was a bit of self-care gold in his shrink's key advice, which was to simply begin every journal entry with the words 'I feel.'

This seemingly benign advice resonated deeply with my own practice of journalling, which has seen me fill a total of four 200-page hardbound notebooks over the last decade. I've fondly preserved these over the years with a mixture of embarrassment and pride sometimes finding myself leafing through angst-riddled early entries, which morphed from hastily scribbled rants to brutally honest letters addressed to my deepest insecurities. Between these pages, I found a safe space that was connected to personal traumas, both felt and inflicted, along with the occasional stab at poetry and on particularly bad days, side-eyed oneliners about the futility of love, work, life and everything in between.