Journaling and Remembering

I've always had trouble remembering details, especially the good details, about my life. Things never seem to get committed to long term storage. My wife will bring up some trip or event and at best I will have a foggy recollection of it. My therapist says it is a common trait for people with depression and cPTSD and I shouldn't beat myself up over it, but I feel bad not always having access to the good memories together.

The efforts I'm making to blog more — to process the fringe, noodley armed thoughts that escape the tangled ball of twine that is my mind — is one of the ways I am working on offloading remembering to something external. It allows me to have something to look back on, to revisit and say "oh right, that is where I was then."

I've never been much for journaling. I never knew "how to do it"... The dear diary approach felt too fluffy to me, and I was always afraid of writing something too personal or vulnerable and having someone else find it and they get access to part of me that I didn't want open to others.

Recently I saw Dan's write up of how he uses bullet journaling and the system makes a lot of sense to me. Now that I've transitioned away from corporate life for a bit, the complex task tracking systems I used in the past no longer serve me, and this simple method of documenting my life, both in the things that I've accomplished and the feelings I've had, feels like something that could help.

The part I really like is the dedicated monthly and yearly reflection periods. The ritual of reflection will hopefully

• enable more personal growth by allowing me to learn faster from my past self
• build the necessary pathways to bring the memories I want to be able to access to the forefront

In a bit of kismet, I also came across this video on the notation types from the creator of the bullet journal method. I really like his view on actions -vs- to-dos, and moving the mentality from obligations to choices in your life.