Journaling

Winter resolutions often include tackling cluttered closets and purging pieces that no longer fit or flatter our evolving selves. The same principle can be applied to organizing our thoughts and intentions through journaling.

Three Topeka women share their decades-long experience with habitual reflection honed through journaling to accomplish goals and resolve issues.

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Marcia Cebulska

As a preteen, author and playwright Marcia Cebulska wrote about boys she liked and clothes she wanted in a pink leather diary with a clasp, key and gold pen.

“I wrote about stuff that’s really embarrassing now, but my journal was a safe place just for me and that’s still true,” she says. “I can vent, dream wildly about things I want to accomplish and test my ideas.”

The title of Cebulska’s book “Skywriting: A Journaling Guide to Help You Soar!” derives from her desire to encourage people to look upward as well as inward as an antidote to spending so much time staring at screens.

“My grandmother told me to look at the sky because it’s always changing,” she says. “The short weather reports in the book are a way to capture the forecast of how you’re feeling for reflection.”

Cebulska has taken and given journaling classes and seen people who have been stuck move forward. She survived a 7.6 earthquake in 1970 in Chile and later breast cancer, discovered six months after marrying and moving to Topeka where she knew no one.

“My journal was my best friend until I got acquainted with my terrific neighbors,” she says.

Cebulska writes every day before bed, chronicling whatever she’s “irritated or elated about” and always concluding with a couple of lines expressing gratitude.

In 1975, Jeffrey Ann Goudie, a freelance writer and book reviewer, began filling a gray bound book with ideas, business expenses, snippets of conversations, quotes and article ideas. She converted to speckled composition books and, most recently, three-subject workbooks, eventually amassing 77 journals.

Although she often jotted down dreams, issues and notes about her travels, her personal reflections didn’t typically rise to the forefront of her journals until early 2020 when she returned home from a trip to Thailand just as the pandemic hit and shortly after her mother broke a hip.

“She went into rehabilitation, and for a year we only saw each other through glass,” Goudie says. “Writing helped me work out my feelings about my experiences.”

She frequently uses colored pencils to make squiggles and doodles to enliven pages along with adding article clippings and book passages.

Goudie agrees with research showing the positive connections that occur in our brains when we write things by hand and how the habit can influence our mental health. She has a journalism degree and has always been drawn to the profession’s record-keeping purpose.

“I once served on a panel about journaling, and the general consensus was that people don’t censor themselves in journals, but I definitely do,” says Goudie, who writes in her journal a couple of times a week when the feeling strikes.

“I went through some very raw family stuff in the 1970s and was amazed at how candid I’d been when I read those journals a few years ago. I hid them in my house so well that now I can’t even find them,” she says, laughing.

Thea Rademacher

Thea Rademacher, author, speaker and president of Flint Hills Publishing, has been journaling since a young age “to express fiery emotions.”

She writes daily in a journal, currently a purple one that came with “a lovely pink pen,” to connect with the divine through a three-fold practice incorporating gratitude, free-flowing thoughts and guided exercises.

“I never liked the notion of having a journaling ‘practice’ because that conveys that this is something you have to get better at instead of just accepting it as a release for yourself,” she says. “Before publishing (Marcia Cebulska’s) ‘Skywriting,’ I wasn’t attracted to guided journals because they seemed like homework, but now I’m surprised by how much value and enjoyment I get from doing the exercises.”

Rademacher likes the tactile sensation of putting pen to paper and derives multiple benefits from her lifelong habit.

“I have a lot of thoughts and ideas, and journaling helps my brain put things in boxes to organize those thoughts, quiet my mind and reduce any anxiety or worry I might have that day,” she says. “It’s a touchstone for putting problems in perspective and a lifeline for me.”

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“I have a lot of thoughts and ideas, and journaling helps my brain put things in boxes to organize those thoughts, quiet my mind and reduce any anxiety or worry I might have that day.”

– Thea Rademacher

Whether you already keep a journal or are curious about starting one, these resources provide an inspirational framework for creative contemplation:

“Skywriting: A Journaling Guide to Help You Soar” Marcia Cebulska

“Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor” Lynda Barry “The Artist’s Way” Julia Cameron “The Untethered Soul” Michael Singer “Oprah’s The Life You Want Planner & Gratitude Journal" Oprah Winfrey

Thea Rademacher Marcia Cebulska