Tag: journal

Back to regular life, sort of

June 28th, 2025

I wrote every day during my recent travel to Europe. My goal was 1000 words a day, but I typically wrote 1500 to 2000. As soon as I began my journey home, on the train from Lille to Brussels, I went back to the beginning of my trip journal and started typing up what I’d written. I used my bookmarks on Google maps to find addresses of restaurants we ate at, or my photos to remind myself of places I didn’t write about, and I listed out what we did each day in the digital copy of my journals*. And then I shaped the entries into blog posts with photographs from each day’s adventures.

I am so happy I wrote every day, and that I went back and typed up what I wrote. This is the first time I’ve done that. Between typing my hand-written entries and then blogging about our days, I got to live the vacation of my dreams three times. It was fresher during the beginning, on the travel home and on the first few days back in Blacksburg. The trip felt very close, like I could touch it again, and see the soft golden light, and hear the street sounds, and taste the crêpes, and feel how the art moved me. Now that two weeks have passed, it is fading. By the time I started typing my final journal entries a few days ago, I was already coming across things I’d forgotten about.

During these past two weeks, I’ve barely cracked my regular journal or written anything new; going through my travel journals and photographs and trying to make sense of them in blog posts has consumed most of my time since I’ve been back. Now, the photos are edited, the drawings are drawn; my journal entries are typed up true to their original stream of consciousness form, then blogged slightly more coherently.

With my travel project complete, I’m back to my normal day to day, which is sad in some ways and comforting in others. It feels strange and small going back to our pre-trip normal after such a grand experience. My habits at home don’t include walking to a café each morning for coffee and a pastry or walking city sidewalks every day. They don’t include riding trains or visiting art museums, buying hats at a chappelerie or sitting in the shade of a lush garden by a trickling fountain with beautiful bronze and marble sculpture. They don’t include trying to capture all of these new experiences in writing.

Instead, I eat my overnight oats each morning. I journal by the window with a cat in my lap, trying to think of something new to write about. I swim at 8am, longer sets than before my sabbatical, when I squeezed my workout into 30 minutes at 5:30am. I walk in our green neighborhood, down green Glade Road, through green Heritage park. Sometimes I draw in my sabbatical journal. I eat lunch at home while I watch birds, usually a smoothie bowl, or a black bean burger with avocado, or half a wheat bagel toasted with pepper jack and everything but the bagel seasoning, with avocado smashed on top. I water my plants. I go to a coffee shop to get out into the world, I lay on the couch and read. I write letters to friends.

My days are slower than our days on vacation, and not quite as stimulating. They don’t provide as much fodder for a creative project as the novelty of my travel journals did. But they are comforting, relaxing, and gratifying. I am trying to soak them up and enjoy them as much as I possibly can right now, because they are not truly regular life. That will begin again in two weeks, when my sabbatical ends and I return to what is actually, truly regular life. I’m starting to think about what habits I can take from sabbatical back into my working life, as this has, without a doubt, been the gift of a lifetime.

*I use the Day One journaling app.

Daily writing prompt
What are your daily habits?
View all responses
Daily drawings

May 14th, 2025

When my team went to New Orleans for a meetup in November, I had a chance to see my friend Pam, who trained me when I joined Automattic a little over ten years ago. She is one of the most creative people I know. She’s a natural writer with a clear voice — I feel like I’m in a room with her when I read her blog — and she sews beautiful clothes.

She also binds books (check out this cool time lapse of her process). When I saw her in New Orleans, she had a gift for me: a journal. That she made! With her own hands! She bound it with paper that has line drawings of flowers every few pages, pasted colorful floral endpapers inside, covered the book in green cloth, and attached a ribbon bookmark with a leaf and a flower charm on it. So much gardening love 😍. As soon as I saw it, I knew exactly what I would do with it. It would be my sabbatical journal.

I saved it for five months, and on my first official day of sabbatical, I created my first entry. I’ve written in it every day of this first four weeks of my sabbatical. I’ve also drawn a little something to illustrate every day.

It’s funny, I like the process of writing, but I rarely go back and read what I’ve written. I do like to go back and look at the drawings, though, even though they’re so amateur. Drawings take a lot less effort to consume. I love flipping through pages and getting little visual reminders of my sabbatical so far.
Journals from Costa Rica: days 7-9 (the end)

June 12th, 2024

Tuesday May 28, 2024. 5:40am

We are at our final Airbnb in Costa Rica, near Tamarindo Beach. We are in a resort area that clearly caters to wealthy tourists. It’s cute and fun, with a whole food truck village (which we haven’t eaten at), and the beaches are gorgeous.

Our daughter and I spent hours at the southern end of Tamarindo Beach yesterday. Our first spot was under a tree down the beach a few meters from a guy juggling machetes. He’d stroll out from under his tree into the sun, we’d hear the metallic schling of one blade running down the other, and then he’d toss them, one, two, then three, and juggle. He’d do that for a few minutes, then catch them each out of the air, then walk back under his tree and sit in his chair he had there. He also juggled what looked to be torches, were it night and the bulbous ends were on fire. He was practicing. He was there for hours.

Our daughter was happy as a clam, laying in the sun and taking swim breaks to cool off in the Pacific Ocean. The waves were gentle, unlike the first beaches where the surf was so big it seemed it’d crush you or pin you under or tumble you or suck you out to sea. After hanging out at the beach for a while, she and I walked to Costa Juice for Pitaya (dragonfruit) bowls, which I’m now addicted to and I want to eat all the time.

12:12pm

I’m sun-screened and bug-sprayed and sitting on a lounge chair in the grotto at the house. I’m in the shade, cross-legged on the lounge chair, leaning forward to write on the end of the chair. I took a brief cool-off dip in the blue-tiled swimming pool a few minutes ago. The water was refreshing since the pool gets some shade. I’m mostly dry now, but my arm may be damp at the bottom corner of the page. It’s just our son and me here; Brian and our daughter are at the beach. I’m reading Hemingway’s Garden of Eden again. I picked up and put down several other books after State of Wonder. This was the only thing I was in the mood for.

I shopped this morning with hour daughter. We went into a tiny artisanal coffee shop off on a side street that roasted their own coffee. I told the woman I’d like to take some home, and she told me all about the coffees and how they’re grown on small farms here in Costa Rica, and roasted here, and I didn’t really care that much but she was passionate about it and sweet and clearly loved the coffees and let me smell them all, and I bought a bag of the one she said is her favorite, and I’m happy to have some coffee to take home with us.

I can feel the sweat beading on my upper lip, and my right arm glistens in the sun as a write. The pool’s fountain tinkles, and I hear a bird whistling in the neighborhood. A breeze moves the pam frond text to me, and the shadow of another sways across my page.

3:30pm

A wind has come up. I’ve moved out of the air conditioning and back out to the grotto where I can hear palm fronds swoosh and every few minutes, the low growl of thunder. Raindrops dimple the pool’s surface. Now they splash. Rain rattles on the corrugated roof above the patio table where I write. Thunder rumbles over the ocean and the sky is dark. Maybe I should pour a glass of wine. Lightning just flashed in my peripheral vision. Now a thunderclap and a hard clatter of rain. the wind is blowing spray under the roof and my pages will soon be wet. The air smells of wet stone, warm from the sun.

This is really only day 8; I apparently didn’t journal on day 7, and day 9 was actually days 9 &10 and was mostly the ordeal of cancelled flights and journaling from airports and an unexpected hotel stay, none of which I care to relive.
Journals from Costa Rica: days 4-6 (the middle)

June 11th, 2024

Friday May 24, 2024 6am

I’m sitting on a giant outdoor futon by a turquoise pool in La Fortuna, Costa Rica. The sun is a smudged glow behind clouds, just above the trees that edge the river that runs along the property. The air is full of bird cries. High twee-twits, a melodious whistle twee twittle twee, a laughing cacacacaca, the cluck of chickens, the cock a doodle doo of a rooster, the hoowa hoowa of something dove-like.

The pool is edged with yellow and green variegated plants, and red and green ones too, along wtih something like a bird of paradise except that the flowers dangle and look like toucan beaks rather than lifting up to look like long sharp bird bills. At the end of the pool are broad-leafed plants almost my height and with giant showy iris-like flowers in lemon yellow and flame orange, and hummingbirds drank from them last night as I floated in a donut inflatable in the pool with a cold glass of white wine.

By the river, the trees drip with lime-green bromeliads and dangling vines that drop all the way from the treetops to just above the water’s surface. Insects whirr. A yellow leaf falls gently into the moving water and drifts downstream.

When we arrived yesterday and piled out of the Suzuki, we went straight to the pool and saw it sparkling in the afternoon sun, filled with inflatable floaty toys that drifted around its edges: two beach balls, two pink-frosted donut inner tubes, a fun noodle, two long lounging floats, and a giant pink flamingo you could lay your whole body on and be a foot above the water and stay completely dry. And a basketball hoop! Our son immediately began looking for a pool basketball.

This morning, when I came out here, the flamingo was dressed up. One donut was around its neck like a necklace. The other was around its back end and had the fun noodle stuck through it to give the flamingo a long arching tail. It had a lounger float under each wing like skis, and the yellow frisbee was on its head like a halo. The flamingo floats around the pool in this getup in the morning sunlight, and each time I see it, I’m tickled all over again by what I assume is Brian’s doing after the rest of us went in last night.

Saturday May 25, 2024. 6:15am

I swam laps for 10 minutes in the pool this morning. The water was too warm and I felt like I was overheating, even at 5:30am. It got me moving, though, which was better than not swimming. Now I sit by the water in the rising sunlight. The volcano is straight ahead of me, La Arenal. Black birds, probably grackles, squawk on tree tops. The monkey masks on the little cabanas around the pool look creepy with the sun rising on them.

Sunday May 26, 2024. 6:24am

I’m on a bench by the pool. Roosters crow from the farm across the gravel road. The sky is heavy with clouds. I can’t see the volcano or the surrounding mountains. It hasn’t rained at all since we’ve been in Costa Rica. We expected rain every day.

We saw sloths yesterday! After lounging by the pool most of the morning, and after Brian and I went into town to eat at Lulu’s soda for a casado, a local meal of rice, black beans, plantains, salad, a tortilla, a small wedge of cheese, and grilled fish, we drove over to a nature sanctuary, the Bogarin trail in town, where we took a mile hike through a forest and saw leaf cutter ants carrying leaves and flowers in long trails along the path. We saw lizards and a giant moth that was not alive but was posed as if it were; I wondered if the guides had put it there. The place we went offered guided tours for $50 per person; self-guided tours were $16. We did the self-guided tour.

We looked to the treetops so much our necks ached. We did not see sloths, nor did we really know where to look or what to look for. We wondered if maybe we should have done the guided tour, though none of us wanted to have to engage and be social and be led around.

But about halfway through the outer loop, either Brian or our son spotted a small sloth hanging from a branch. It was close enough that we could see it’s little face! It was so cute we all wanted to die.

The hike started pleasantly in terms of temperature — we expected to be sweating buckets, but in the shade of the green forest, the temperature was surprisingly tolerable. As the minutes ticked on, though, and my backpack smothered my back, I became slick with sweat. We went in the afternoon, maybe around 2pm, and we walked slowly to look for sloths. The sun sets at 6pm, and by 4, the light was getting low. Mosquitos began to emerge, and I soon was covered in bug bites and was ready to come home. Our stomachs were growling, too. So after seeing the first little sloth, then near the end of the loop seeing a message drawn in the dirt of the path, “SLOTH look up,” and looking up to see a big sloth, then going back to see the little sloth again, we hiked out.

Our son wanted pizza — “something smothered in cheese” — so we stopped by the Papa Johns that was on the way home and that we had previously laughed about looking so out of place. I drank chilled white wine and we ate pizza in front of the TV while we watched F1 qualifying for Monaco.

Now it’s time to move Airbnbs again. This time we move from the jungle house with the pool to the beach house with the pool in Tamarindo. Only 3 more days in Costa Rica. I’m ready for it to end and not ready for it to end.
Journals from Costa Rica: days 1-3 (the beginning)

June 10th, 2024

Monday May 20, 2024, 12:15pm

We’re in flight on our way to Costa Rica. I’m in an aisle seat and our daughter is next to the window, her back to the oval shutter, her head resting sideways on the headrest, and her socked, Birkenstocked feet in the empty seat between us. The flight from Charlotte to Liberia is half empty.

I’m reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder again, and it’s so good. It’s set in the humid wilds of the Brazilian Amazon, where insects are mammoth and mosquitos carry fatal fevers. I hope our bug repellant works.

The plane is vibrating and the journal’s paper feels ticklish under my hand.

I also brought Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird to help me get in the mood to write. Right now I mostly just want to read, though. And eat. I wonder if there will be a snack service at least. American Airlines is not as nice as Delta, there aren’t even screens to watch on an international flight.

Wednesday May 22, 2024 5:11pm

I’m in our Airbnb at the first stop in Costa Rica, Playa Potrero. The kids and Brian walked out to the beach for a sunset swim, and I stayed back. My arches hurt from walking in sand. Also, I finished reading State of Wonder and now I’m grumpy because I finished my book, which was excellent and exactly what I wanted for being here, but now it’s over and I don’t have a replacement.

We saw monkeys our first night here, just running and swinging through the trees above our Airbnb.

We’ve been to beautiful beaches that actually have shade we can sit under and listen to the waves. Today I sat on the beach that’s walking distance from our house, and I drew. I drew the husk of a coconut that was on the sand in front of me, my flip-flops, a vine on the beach, the cliffs and water, and my straw hat hanging on a branch to dry because I’d soaked it when I swam out with our son and dove under a wave to avoid getting sucked under.

The sun is dropping and I want to go look for monkeys. I’m going up on the roof. Maybe I’ll see the sun set, too.

I’m going to read Bird by Bird again.

5:51pm

I’m inside the house in a little glass-walled alcove between the living room and our bedroom. I’m on monkey watch. I went out on the roof alone because the light was low and dusky, and I thought they might come out early; when we saw them Monday night, it was after we’d swum until the sun set, and then came up to the house, and then saw monkeys.

I stood on the roof alone about 15 minutes but saw nothing. I came back in after observing the neighborhood from above and snapping a couple of photos of a vine climbing a palm tree across the street.

There’s not a breath of wind out there. I’m inside because I’ve already showered and I don’t want to put bug spray on.

Thursday May 23, 2024 5:01am

We did not see monkeys last night. I waited by the windows until sunset, then went outside when Brian and the kids got home. I watched the treetops for several minutes outside. They talked about how it wasn’t guaranteed that the monkeys would show up again at the same time and place, but I really wanted to believe they would. I watched more from outside, then moved inside to watch, and I never saw any more.

We leave for our next Airbnb this morning. I’ve got a lot of packing to do. I completely unpacked my suitcase — I hung my clothes or folded them on shelves. I also gutted my backpack. The charts for my eye therapy are in the little glass alcove. My sketchpads, laptop, and watercolors are on the table in the alcove, too. My pen bag is sitting on the concrete island in the kitchen where I sat to write. I will need to put all these things away. Bird by Bird. My kobo.

It’s lighter out now. I’d like to sit outside to write. I’ll need to take the bug spray with me.

I’m outside now and stink of Deep Woods OFF. Gross. I can hear the pounding of surf on the beach, the cawing of tropical birds, the occasional gutteral growling of unknown animals.

A raccoon just passed through on the back deck. It looked at me and I looked at it. It walked on by while I remained lounging in the lounge chair.

I just heard the whirr of wings, like the sound I heard on the first night when large insects slammed into my chest in the dusky dark, large insects I imagined to be golf-ball sized cockroaches.

I’m eager for our next house. It has a gorgeous pool that I imagine spending a lot of time next to when we’re there.

There’s no breeze out here today; the air is very still. I wonder what it will be like in La Fortuna. Brian said the car ride could be bad. I felt sick yesterday when we drove to Brasilito and I sat in the back seat. Our neighborhood road is rocky and rutted and very bouncy in the car, and then the paved roads are winding and have intermittent sharp speed bumps, all of which are nauseating in the cramped back seat of the Suzuki. It’s not going to be a comfortable ride. We’ll go to the pharmacy next to the coffee shop to get motion sickness pills. I want another smoothie bowl as well.

Our son made us pasta last night for dinner. We had bowtie noodles, parmesan, and an under-ripe tomato. Brian and I drank some cold white wine with it. We all lined up at the concrete island on the too high barstools and ate it side by side while we listened to music on the bluetooth speaker Brian packed. I don’t remember what we listened to.

Brian’s out here now. He’s in the lounge chair next to me. He just clapped his hands together, presumably to kill a bug. A couple of minutes ago, we heard a crashing in the trees above us. I watched the swaying branches for a monkey, but it was just a squirrel.

I just rubbed my face, and I’m so greasy.

The squirrel is knocking things out of the trees and they’re thunking to the ground after rustling through palm fronds as they fall. I’m not sure what it is that it’s dropping. Maybe sea grapes, or pieces of coconuts.

8:30am

I watch the treetops across the “river.” I watch for them to twitch or sway. This is a sign of monkeys. In a densely leafed tree across the way, I see a black-brown lump turn a head and drop a curled tail, then move hand over hand on all fours to leap to another branch across the water. The limb dips low under the weight of the monkey, then straightens as the moneky scrambles to a thicker, sturdier part of the limb close to the trunk.

Now I see no movement. Even the single compound leaf that waved to me in some localized eddy of breeze has stilled. I hear the high-pitched whine of a shop-vac, the buzz of cicadas, the grind of a chainsaw, the squeak of someone rubbing glass that won’t come clean. Yellow butterflies flutter ditzily over the still water. Birds chortle across the way. If I listen hard, I hear the swoosh of waves on the beach.

My skin is sticky with sweat and bug spray. A fly lands on my shin and I twitch it away. I swept the deck yesterday, and the table out here as well, and both are littered again with tiny oval leaves the size of my pinky nails.

Something nearby is making a repeated “hwaa” sound. I don’t know what kind of animal it is. I hear the thwack of a nail-gun. I hear the sweep of a broom across pavers.
Motivations for keeping a journal

February 17th, 2024

I know what my motivations are not. In all my years of journaling I’ve rarely reread a journal entry. Journals from the past 20 years line my shelf. I can’t bear to get rid of them, but I also know I will never read them. I’m not interested in looking backward. Keeping records does not motivate me to journal.

I frequently think I’ll want to journal to warm me up so that I can write something real. But that rarely happens. I’ll journal for 10 or 30 minutes, and then my writing itch is satisfied and I don’t move on to something that’s not riddled with “I”s. So “writing warmup” is not a motivator either.

Journaling has always pulled me toward it. I have garden journals, gratitude journals, tarot journals. I have hand-written journals, digital journals, drawn journals. I have journals of pen inks, book journals, nutrition journals, cycling journals, running journals, work journals. But why?

Sometimes, I think I want to journal so that I can observe my progress in an area. That’s where the cycling and running journals would come in, or the journals I start when I want to pick up a new habit. I do reference some of the more specific journals, like my gardening and tarot journals, so I can see what was happening at this time last year in the garden, or learn from other times I’ve pulled a certain tarot card. But I don’t end up using journals to track progress over time (see “I’m not interested in looking backwards” above). It might be good for me to reflect and all that, but ugh, I don’t want to.

I do know one of my motivations for journaling is that I like to write. Plain and simple. Take words out of my brain and put them in order on a page? Yes please. Journaling is the most frictionless path to do that. I love using my fountain pens, but I’m fine tapping words out on a keyboard as well. Journaling helps me clear my head. It gets messy in there if I don’t let some of the words out. Similarly, but a little different, I journal to clarify my thinking. I frequently turn to pen and paper when I’m trying to work through a problem, and I need to get all the pieces out on paper (it does have to be paper when I need to work through a problem). This helps me understand what I think, whereas when it’s all swirling around in my head, I can’t put all the pieces together in a way that makes sense.

But even those motivators don’t explain the fact that I tend to start journals for everything I’m interested in. Several of my journals don’t involve stringing words together. My nutrition journal is primarily checkboxes and colors. My drawn journal is sketches, often without words. So what is it that drives me to say, “I’m going to start a journal for that”?

I think my motivation for journaling is that it helps me focus on the things I want to bring into my life. To capture something on paper or screen, I have to give that thing my attention. I have to say, “What did I eat today? Did I eat anything green?” Or “What’s beautiful in the garden today?” Or “What’s going on in my head? What do I think?” Or “What am I thankful for today?”

It is work to do this! And strangely, I think that’s a motivator as well. When I sat at the breakfast table this morning and read the prompt*, “What are my motivations for journaling?”, I had a bunch of thoughts. The presence of a lot of thoughts could make it seem like it’d be easy to answer such a prompt. But thinking without writing is very different from actually writing. It took effort for me to pull out my laptop and start writing. A lot more effort than what I had previously planned to do, which is lay on the couch and read.

But the effort of journaling results in creation rather than consumption. It feels good to create. You put in the effort, you make something, and it’s concrete. It’s not ephemeral. The act of creation feels very grounding. And the work of creating makes me feel satisfied. I like to lay on the couch and read, and that is what I’ll do next, but reading doesn’t make me feel satisfied. Not like writing does. And especially not like writing towards something I want bring into my life.

*I’m doing a journaling challenge through the Day One journaling app, and today’s prompt was “What are my motivations for journaling?“