Journaling Our Stories Helps Us Learn From Them
I’ve been journaling and keeping scrapbooks my whole life. In fact, by the time I was 16, I had completed 13 journals! I grew up with a mother who loved family history and taught me to love it too. We were forever looking for names, dates, and places for people long since passed.
Learning to Love Stories
But that wasn’t all that my mom was looking for. She often shared the stories that she had found along the way. Back then, it was much more difficult to find out about our ancestors. We did not have the benefit of the internet. But there were still ways to find the stories and that was the part that fascinated me most. Learning what my great-great grandmother had gone through as a child migrating west, including having survived frost bite with the help of a local Native American woman, helped me see the world outside myself and put my own challenges into perspective.
These precious stories were hard to come by, so they are absolutely priceless! Now my mom has a few other women in her family who are excited to help preserve and share the stories of our family; including me.
Reviving the Artform of Journaling
Today’s generations will have more photographs of their lives than our ancestors could possibly have dreamed of. But without journaling, the stories behind the photos will be lost.
Journaling is a way for us to tell our stories. We can be honest in our journal. Share what’s in our heart. Say as little or as much as we want. The important thing is to get it out of our heads and into a journal so we can let it go for now and still remember later. And so we can share our stories with others later on in life.
And that’s my mission. I want to help kids, teens, and adults develop the habit of writing about their lives each day. Today, you might write a sentence or two, tomorrow it could be an entire page. Length is not important. But the stories matter. The stories teach, encourage, lift, build, and remind us of what is truly important.
If you’re looking for a way to help children and youth you know develop the habit of writing in a journal each day, check out my All About Me Kid’s Journal and All About Me Teen Journal. You can find all my journals on Amazon.
