Journaling, unrehearsed thoughts and natural conversation.

I've never understood journaling. Whenever I read diaries or blog entries from other people, they always seem so free-form and spontaneous. As if people are transcribing whatever thoughts or emotions they're experiencing at the moment directly from their brain.

When I try to put my real feelings to paper, I completely blank. I suffer from chronic rumination, so a lot of my trains of thought run over and over in my head. They take the form of myself trying to explain something to an imaginary person. It helps with reaffirming opinions or figuring out why I feel the way I do about certain things.

If I come to new a realization about something, or figure out a better way to articulate something, I'll restart the mental conversation and run through it again until it sounds just right. The problem with this (aside from being mentally exhausting...) is that it results in pretty much all the interesting things I have to say being heavily rehearsed and editorialized in my head. Spontaneous and novel thoughts sometimes happen for me, but mostly when I'm lying in bed at like... 1 am, as I'm trying to fall asleep. At which point they get put into the grinder and become processed thoughts.

So journaling is tough because putting things down on paper that I've already thought word-for-word in my head feels... weird and disingenuous. Real time conversations are the same way. My idea of a conversation is repeatedly exchanging explanations, info-dumps and anecdotes already prepared in my head. Unless it's related to something I've already "thought through", I don't really know how to process input from other people or instantly come up with "new" thoughts based on current context. I feel like I'm almost never able to put out "the real me" into the world because the process of trying to express myself is too intentional and mechanical and it just feels awkward.

But, I guess even if it's a bit rehearsed, it's better to put these thoughts down somewhere rather than having them constantly bounce around in my head. Maybe journaling will, at the very least, provide some catharsis and I won't feel compelled to think in circles all the time.