I’ve been journaling regularly since I was 10 years old, and what started as a normal “Dear Diary” style silly tween thoughts has slowly expanded into what I now call a journal ecosystem. 

What a journal ecosystem is

A journal ecosystem is basically just having multiple journals that each serve a different purpose, kind of like how you’d have different notebooks for different classes in school. Everything has its place. 

It means all my different thoughts never have to compete for space, and when I go back to them, I can find what I’m looking for. I’ve found that having dedicated journals for different areas of my life makes me way more consistent too, because I’m never staring at a blank page wondering what kind of thing I’m supposed to be writing. It limits overthinking (always my goal as an overthinking-girlie) and the intention is already built in.

Currently I have my diary, my media consumption journal, my prayer journal, my junk journal, and my commonplace journal.

My diary

I use my diary to document my everyday life and always, always, ALWAYS use it to complain (it’s therapeutic). It’s my free-flowing thoughts, my reflections on life, what’s going on, moments I’m experiencing. If I don’t have any reflections to record for the week, I write out Things I Have Liked Recently and Things I Have Not Liked Recently (because, as I said, I love to complain and beat a dead horse). I do this in bullet point format to keep a quick log of what I’ve been doing and the things that haven’t been working in my life.

This is a really grounding practice for me because not everything in life is perfect, not everyone in my life is perfect, I’m not perfect, and I do get annoyed and irritated easily. It’s a place for me to just have to get it all out. 

Also, after a really heavy entry, one thing I try to do is end the entry on a small good note. I’ll be venting for a full page and then be like, okay, here’s a little bit of perspective, here’s a little bit of positivity. To kind of reframe my brain and also make sure journaling is not making me feel worse than I already do.

I will say I don’t do that with every entry, sometimes I’ll still end the page with an angry sentence in all caps and multiple exclamation points, so. Balance. But if writing in your diary makes you feel rotten sometimes, that’s my biggest piece of advice.

I genuinely believe everyone should have a diary. It keeps me SO sane. Every year for my birthday, I write an entry on what I’ve learned throughout the year and the only reason I’m able to reflect on that is because I can flip back through years and years of diary entries to see what I learned. I love my diary, she’s my lifeline!!

My media consumption journal

I call this my media consumption journal but to be honest it is 90% just movies and occasionally shows and music. I watch a lot of movies and I really care about being able to articulate why I liked something in the film and why I didn’t. It’s a little junk journal-ish for some spreads if I feel inspired, but mostly I put in the movie poster, the date I watched it, the director, the year, and a ticket stub if I have one.

I do have a Letterboxd, but I don’t think all my thoughts on movies need to be in a public forum, so on Letterboxd I usually just write one extremely unfunny sentence and a star rating. I’m not a film critic and I’m not trying to be. I am just the average movie enjoyer. I truly just joke about being a cinephile. 

My prayer journal

I’ve been using the yearly journal from Val Marie Paper for about five years now. I like that it has sections for each area of your life to pray in because it gives me a good place to start. There are notes pages in the back for writing out prayers, which I find helpful because I can write prayers I always return to.

I also record my dreams in here because I have very vivid dreams (I’m a Pisces, haha). Sometimes I’ll find interesting things to pull from them and see how I was feeling in that season of life. Also, it’s fun to return to a really dumb dream, like one time I dreamt I went to Whole Foods with Venus Williams. Or another where I dreamt Brendan Urie performed at the halftime show in drag. Just normal stuff.

This is also helpful for me because it spares the people in my life the (what I would consider is an honor) burden of hearing about my ridiculous dreams. I love hearing about people’s dreams though, please tell me your dreams!!!

My junk journal

I used to call this my art journal until I discovered people started calling it “junk journaling”. I do this monthly, or whenever I have inspiration or when I want to document travel. My monthly roundups include anything I watched, read, listened to, went to, or bought that month that’s worth noting. I do this because I like looking back at what I was into. Like, I can go back to 2024 and see that I was really into watching Resident Evil playthroughs on YouTube or something. So it’s a reminder of things that brought me comfort if I ever need to return to them.

I’ve been doing monthly roundups since 2017, and in my junk journal since 2022 so it’s nice to have almost a decade’s worth of seeing how my months have shaped my years.

My commonplace journal

I have four journals in my Louise Carmen dedicated to memories, my artist’s journey, topics I’m interested in, and curriculums I’m going through.

A commonplace journal is basically a place to keep thoughts, quotes, ideas, and information you want to return to. Like a personal reference book you build over time based on what interests you. My version of this is loosely based on that meme about “my Roman empires,” just topics I’m passionate about, return to often, and enjoy having opinions on.

I’ve also been using it to work through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, specifically the morning pages practice, where you free-flow write your thoughts every morning. I don’t do it every single day, but I take the journal prompts and discovery prompts from the book and work through them here. It’s similar to my diary but keeping my creative journey separate from my everyday life is good for referencing different thought-patterns and discoveries.

On having a lot of journals

Honestly, I don’t think you need five journals to get anything meaningful out of journaling. One journal and a consistent practice is more than enough. But if you’re someone who gets a little manic about organization and has a million different things going on in your head at once (like meeee), having a home for each kind of thought adds perspective and peace of mind. 

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that the system matters less than the habit, it’s really about whatever gets you to the page.