I Wasn't Journaling. I Was Excavating.

I thought I was hiding my darkest thoughts. I was really hiding my truest self.

People hear the word “journaling” and picture a woman in a linen robe with a cup of tea, writing three things she’s grateful for in a notebook with a gold-foil cover, maybe a candle burning somewhere in the background. I want to be clear about something: that was never what I was doing.

What I was doing, most nights in 2008 and for years after, was closer to digging. I’d sit down at the kitchen table with a cheap notebook and a pen that was almost out of ink, and I would go down. Past the version of myself that smiled at church, past the version that told my mother-in-law everything was wonderful, even though I was still hurt by some things she said about me not working, past the version that told my husband on the phone that the kids were fine and money was fine and I was fine, down under all of that, to the dirt where the actual things were buried. The resentment I wasn’t allowed to have. The exhaustion I wasn’t allowed to name because other women had it worse. The specific memory of being a kid and being told to be quiet when I asked why I was different and why I couldn’t live with my mom who was living in South Florida pursuing her career in law enforcement, to not make trouble, to not need so much — a sentence that had apparently taken up permanent residence somewhere behind my ribs and was still running the show twenty years later, in my solar plexus were I felt all the discomfort from my childhood trauma.

That’s not journaling. Journaling sounds like tidying up. What I was doing felt more like an excavation site, the kind archaeologists rope off, brushing dirt away one careful inch at a time because whatever’s underneath might crumble if you go at it too fast. Except I wasn’t careful. I went at it with my bare hands most nights, digging up things I hadn’t looked at in years because looking at them felt like it might collapse something structural in me. Turns out it was the opposite. The things I dug up and left buried were the ones doing the damage. The ones I got onto paper stopped rotting.

I found things down there I didn’t expect. I found out I was still angry at my father for choosing his career over bedtime stories, over showing up and wanting me in his life, over choosing me, and that anger had somehow turned into me marrying a man who was also often gone, like I’d built a life that would let me practice the same wound on a loop that I felt as a child. I found the belief underneath the belief. Not “I overeat because I’m stressed,” but “I am not worth being chosen, so I might as well feed myself since no one else is going to.” I didn’t go looking for that sentence. I dug for an hour and hit it like a shovel hitting rock, and then I had to sit with it, because now that it was out of the ground, I couldn’t pretend it had never been buried there.

Gratitude lists are lovely. I have nothing against a woman and her candle and her three good things. But that’s maintenance work, done on ground that’s already been cleared. I’m there now after 10 years of full remission. But what I needed back then, for years, was excavation, the unglamorous, dirt-under-your-fingernails work of finding out what was actually down there before I could clear anything at all. Nobody puts that on a Pinterest board. Nobody photographs the page where you finally wrote down the thing your father or mother never said and the thing you’ve never forgiven him or her for not saying. The hugs that were never given because of their absence.

I still write at that kitchen table sometimes, notebook open, dirt figuratively under my nails. It’s not peaceful. It’s not always pretty. Some nights I dig and find nothing but more dirt, and some nights I hit something that changes the shape of everything I thought I knew about myself.

If what you’ve been calling journaling actually feels like breaking ground on something you buried a long time ago, I don’t think you’re doing it wrong. I think you’re finally doing the part everyone else skips. And know this: it’s all part of the messy middle of healing from trauma and addiction.

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 Do you want help developing a self-care plan that works for your own busy schedule? Do you want accountability in implementing a self-care plan? If you or someone you love is struggling to maintain optimal mental and emotional health, consider reaching out to Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. We are a Metro Atlanta, Conyers Georgia area. We are a coaching and counseling practice with empathetic, skilled counselors and recovery coaches who can help you set goals, develop a self-care routine, and move forward to build a more fulfilling life. Our team would be happy to work with you either just for a couple of sessions to develop and implement a Self-care plan or longer term to work toward overall better mental health within our membership site or other programs.

About The Author:  Dr. Nikki LeToya White MSEd-TL, Ph.D. RHN is the founder, director, and full-time board-certified trauma-informed nutritionist, folk herbalist, and wellness consultant at Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. She created Spiced Life Conversation, LLC Art Wellness Studio, and Botanica to provide the Metro Atlanta area with counseling and coaching services where clients are carefully matched with the right program for healing abandonment and childhood emotional neglect trauma that cause codependency, emotional eating, financial stress, and imposter syndrome as it relates to the fear of success and being abandon. We help you begin your emotional healing journey with ease. Recently, we have expanded to include an online membership site so we now provide support to people living all over the world. All of our recovery coaches provide at least one evidence-based treatment to assist in your recovery. Dr. White is a big proponent of self-care and helping people live a fulfilling life! She has been in full remission with both codependency and emotional binge eating disorder since 2016. In living a life in recovery from sugar addiction. I love my low-sugar balanced lifestyle.

Best Regards

Dr. Nikki LeToya White