Journalling: Clear up your thoughts with vulnerability-slop

Some journalling tricks a catgirl used to 10x her personal growth

Yayy, time for me to tackle ~ journalling ~ an extremely niche topic barely covered by any blog posts or papers or videos :o! wow, so brave! I can’t speak at the moment, but I learned something about how to type, so let me write about what helped me so much.

I really really like the method of Journalling that involves dumping all of your stream of consciousness directly onto the page. I will tell you why I care, how to get started, and techniques to level up.

I tried it a few times. I failed a few times. But once I got a method that worked, I bootstrapped from never-writing-anything, to crafting ~130k words of typo-ridden, raw, embarrassing vulnerability-slop in less than a year. And you could too!

It helped bootstrap me from my Era of Stagnation into my Era of Growth. It helped me grow, to make stronger friendships, to Inkhaven where I write this post. It helped me realize more strongly when I could just do things.

Why even try journalling?

I started for a slightly slightly embarrassing combination of two reasons:

The first reason was from reading a comment on LessWrong. It was something like¹:

“All you rationalists claim to want to be happy. And yet you don’t do simple things to make yourself happy? Curious. For example, journalling is a very simple, evidence-backed intervention shown to make you more happy, but most don’t care to try it?”

Ok, yikes. You got me there.

And so it was kind of in the back of my mind for a while while I continued to not do anything for a while. You see, I didn’t really know how to journal…

The second reason was that I found a method that was easy.

What I needed was a way of journalling that still worked when I was lazy. If I’m in a state of mind where journalling would be helpful, it felt like it wasn’t worth trying because I knew I would just reach a mental block when writing.

But I then, in my old habitual loops of procrastination, I stumbled upon a video², and found a method of journalling described. It involves making an unfiltered stream of thoughts directly onto a page, without structure or effort. I describe it as such:

Method: Dumping your stream of consciousness directly onto the page

Get a physical notebook and pen, and start writing words on a page, exactly as you are thinking them. All of them. In raw form. Try to transcribe your thoughts. Do this for at least a couple of pages.

Initially you will probably start thinking something like “Oh, what, writing like this is so weird, idk, guh, I don’t know what I’m want to write about, this feels so unnatural and strange, why am i doing this, uhhh idk, i guess i was reading this weird blog by this person who is supposedly a catgirl… oh my god this is so cringe… and she recommended this but I really don’t see how it could help, but I guess it seemed to help her, but i just like don’t feel like my thoughts are the same when writing in this weird way, and…”

Just write these thoughts too. All of them.

Just keep going. Eventually, you will get past the “it feels weird” stage. Sometimes you will get stuck and be like “guh I’m stuck and don’t know what to think about next”. Write that down too.

You will probably feel frustration that you can’t write as fast as you are thinking. That’s fine. You can write that too. You can stop a thought mid sentence and start writing a new thought if you want.

At some point you might feel like you can’t write something down because it’s a forbidden thought, that you don’t want anyone to see or even to acknowledge to yourself that you thought it.

Write that down too. Yes, even if it’s hard.

If you’re then thinking that it was uncomfortable to write it, write that now too.

Don’t look back or read over things. Don’t worry about spelling. Just keep writing.

Before you know it, you will have spent an hour in a flow state writing 7 pages of vulnerability slop about how you feel like you weren’t conscious until you were 17 but then wasted years watching educational content and thinking about how to save 5€/week rather than doing anything useful and this lead you to still feel bad spending 10$ on API credits, and how you don’t like your waist-to-hip ratio, and how you are stressed from procrastinating writing an 8 page paper, and that need write a 2 sentence response to week-old email to get the money someone wanted to give you, and that you still have not taken out the bins…

and after it’s all written down, you may feel your head clear up, even if only for a while.

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Why do I like this so much?

I guess a few things:

• It is easy to get started and pretty natural when you get used to it. You don’t need much practice. You don’t feel fake writing it the same way you might when doing a bullet-point “pros and cons” list in google docs. It’s you thinking thoughts, and your ability to write to slightly control how they go, and documenting your thoughts.

• The writing forces you to have the thoughts be clear enough that you can write them down. After writing something, you can note “huh, I’m not sure that’s true”, write that down, and maybe make more considerations that you hadn’t thought of. And you can maybe feel “huh, maybe it’s not so bad after all”. Or maybe it is that bad. You can write that down too.

• After things ARE written down, you feel much clearer, like you had thoughts that were fighting for space in your mind, and now that you have written them down, they feel acknowledged and that you no longer need to worry about it.

I did this many times over the course of a year, and especially in the summer in August, and in the winter in December/January this year, I found it extremely useful.

Some tips for your first time

The first time you do this, I do recommend doing it with a pen and paper. It is frustrating, but do it anyway. Laptops are too distracting. Put away your phone too.

And the first few times you do it, don’t share it with anybody.

There is a very fragile loop of "thinking thoughts that are forbidden and writing them down on a page” that is very easy to fall out of. If you know someone else might read them, you just won’t write them down, and you will stop yourself thinking your own thoughts, and this is bad. When I was much younger and more vulnerable, I tried journalling a couple times, but someone tried to read my journal and it took me years before I felt comfortable writing things down again. Don’t let that happen.

You want to be able to see your own thoughts without a filter, in order to be able to process them. In normal speech you just learn not to say some thoughts. But if you are in tight feedback loop between thinking and writing, disrupting this can make it much harder to think about your thoughts too.

I find writing at night tends to lead me to having more unhinged, more emotional, and longer journals, but you don’t have to. You can do it in the morning. You can do it when work is not working and your mind was racing with thoughts to help clear your thoughts. Maybe try a few different times.

Lastly, if you struggle to come up with things even as the page goes on, you can start just like, listing some of the things that happened today. But you should probably mostly just focus on writing whatever you’re already thinking.

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Leveling up

Once you have the basics down, and find you are not holding back, you can do some steps to make your vulnerability slop hit deeper:

• Laptop: Once you have gotten into the ability to write on a page consistently, you might want to move to writing on your laptop. Typing is faster than writing. Use whatever application you like³. If you find yourself getting distracted too much, you can go back to pen-and-paper too.

• Sharing: I also find that, once I got some idea of writing thoughts and life and preferences down (and trust me, many of them are very cringe), I was inspired by Celeste’s OpenSource Woman Post to start sharing my vulnerability slop with my friends⁴. Don’t do this unless you’re comfortable, but it can be a good upgrade.

  • It was very scary at first, but writing about some topics (e.g: where I felt like I’m a bad person, or where I was broken) and then taking the leap of vulnerability to share these diaries with my friends, led me to feel way less bad about it than before. I also felt more motivated to do more journalling and write more vulnerability slop than before.

  • Note: This probably would NOT work with an arbitrary group of friends. If you do have friends that are kinda toxic or that would make fun of you for being vulnerable, then you should probably not share your journals with them, and you should maybe also get better friends.

  • You probably also don’t want to get in the habit of sharing every writing or brain-dump that you do, since you want to retain the freedom of thinking and writing thoughts that feel spooky and forbidden.

• Topic prompts: I find having a specific topic to think about also very useful, especially if it’s a topic you feel insecure about or want to make progress on. You might start off having some dump of cached thoughts, but after a short while should make some progress on thinking about new things too.

• Critiques: You can also use an LLM to analyze your thoughts and get to know you and push back and help you think. I usually didn’t find this super useful but it was better than nothing, but it sometimes helped in the wind-down, and your mileage may vary.

After learning to level up, I found journalling this even more useful.

It let me feel emotions that I was struggling to feel for a long time, to stop feeling bad about emotions that I did have, to notice that I really strongly have ADHD and needed to get diagnosed asap, that I was stagnating doing the work I was doing, that I was burnt out, that I wasn’t living my best life, that I was collecting a bunch of useful information that I should post online.

And it also helped strengthen the relationships with some of the people I cared most about, and be vulnerable with friends to a level I hadn’t been before.

But it wasn’t all sunshine and flowers and rainbows

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Are there any downsides?

Yeah I think there are non-zero downsides.

First, spending time explicitly thinking about things you are insecure about and have bottled up, means you will probably break down and cry sometimes. I bottled up some things that you needed to process long ago. Getting this out was good for me, but it still took some time to process things.

Second, spending too much time in a loop with only your thoughts can sometimes feel weird. It felt almost psychedelic, and I guess it made me understand why there are warnings about meditation. This seems mostly unique to me for journalling, but your mileage may vary.

Third, you should really make sure that your notebook is somewhere safe and where nobody would be able to just read it, because having your journals read without your consent can be pretty stressful.

You know your own personality and circumstances better than me.

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For me personally, I found it really valuable. I guess I was stuck on a lot of things that were just out of my sight and it helped me notice a lot of them.

As a side-effect, it also just made me have less of an ugh field around writing longer posts and documents, and it’s been helpful in removing that feeling.

I may share my general journalling and health + task-tracking routine stuff some other day some time too.

I hope you might try it :)

1. It was a long time ago, sorry but I cannot find the original comment

2. I think it might have been this video by Elizabeth Filips, but I watch it again and feel like it’s different to what I remembered, and can’t

3. I personally quite like using the LunaTask application, which is an end-to-end journalling and life management app, though it’s closed-source. You might prefer obsidian, or notion, or google docs, or signal note-to-self with disappearing messages, or apple notes, or whatever.

4. You can DM me if you want to read my poorly formatted vulnerability slop, but I’ll only share if I know you sufficiently well