Article: Why I’m Using a WhatsApp Journal to Process These Uncertain Times

It’s not a perfect system. But the system you use is better than the system you don’t.

I’ve significantly cut back on my social media usage over the past few years, but I still gravitate toward Twitter for breaking news, election returns, and (as I’ve learned recently) updates about global pandemics. One could make a compelling argument that these are three of the least productive and most anxiety-inducing times to check Twitter, but here we are.

In any event, a few weeks ago I came across a Twitter thread that began with this:

Advice from a historian in the Boston area: Start keeping a journal today, ideally a hand written one if that’s within your ability. Write about what you’re seeing in the news, how yr friends are responding, what is closed in yr neighborhood or city or state or country. Save it.

I’ve been meaning to start journaling for years. I know how clarifying it is to process the world around me through writing. As I wrote (naturally) in The Writing Cooperative last year, writing is often “a tool to make sense of the thoughts and ideas bouncing around in our brains. A tool to process the endless complexities of life. To bring some order to our questions and doubts, anxieties and inclinations, by distilling them on the page.”

Yet even though I’ve long known the clarifying power of writing, I never succeeded in making journaling even a minor part of my daily routine. Why? Probably for the same reason that many of us intend to do things we know would be good for us but don’t actually do them: I just didn’t.

Until these tweets (and the global pandemic that prompted them) inspired me to attempt, once again, to build a journaling habit that would work for me. It would need to fit my existing lifestyle, rather than requiring a dramatic change (any more than the past few weeks already have). It would need to be something I could do easily, not something that I’d come to see as a burden or obligation or one more to-do on my to-do list. If I wanted this journaling thing to stick, I realized, it would need to be digital, quickly accessible, seamlessly update-able, and part of a service or app I already use.

I settled on, of all things, WhatsApp.

For about a month now I’ve had a WhatsApp group called — wait for it — “Journal.” I’m the only person in this group. (To figure out how to create it, I just Googled the lonely statement, “How to create a WhatsApp group with yourself.”)

There’s no structure to how or when I use it; I just send passing thoughts and reflections and streams of consciousness as they come to me. I send pictures of routine life in lockdown. I send screenshots of news articles that capture what I see the world saying and thinking at that moment. I send photos of nice things, like sunsets that seem incongruously beautiful given the chaos pervading every corner of the globe. I send notes about fears, worries, uncertainties, anxieties, realizations, ideas, and other fleeting thoughts that pop into my head, and I send them as they happen to pop into my head.

Here’s one from right after I started the journal:

This is SO WEIRD. A roller coaster of emotions — everything’s totally normal, everything is changing forever, then back to normal, and repeat…

One from the day after that:

QUESTION: When did thinking switch from “when will things get back to normal?” to “what will the new normal look like?”

And one from more recently:

A thought just popped into my head: When’s the next time I’ll ride a bus?

That’s basically it. It’s not profound or complicated at all, which is why it seems to have worked so far. There’s no barrier to entry, and hardly any barrier to maintenance. Because WhatsApp is already part of my daily life, maintaining this e-habit requires almost no additional effort or attention. Because I can’t go back and edit the messages after I’ve sent them, I don’t waste any time worrying about style or flow or phrasing or word choice or syntax or anything else. Because there’s no format or regularity to these messages, I have no expectations that I need to meet (and, thus, no expectations I can beat myself up for not meeting).

I just think, process, send, move forward. Think, process, send, move forward.

A system like this has plenty of shortcomings. Opening WhatsApp to share a post with my one-person group also opens me up to distractions and reminds me of other messages that need a response. Little digital notes aren’t particularly secure or particularly easy to preserve for posterity. Writing by hand would probably be less distracting and more mentally cleansing. Every time I see the words “from Facebook” at the bottom of the app, my blood pressure goes up. And anything that encourages me to spend more time on my phone — even if it’s just a few extra seconds — tethers me more tightly to my device and moves me further from being in control of my time and attention.

In other words, my solo WhatsApp journal may not be the “best” system — whatever that means — for processing what I’m feeling and experiencing. But for something like this, the system you use is always better than the system you don’t. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as it works for you.

We’re living through remarkable, and remarkably unsettling, times. You may not be able to control the chaos and uncertainty in the world, but maybe you can make a little more sense of the complex emotions and anxieties and apprehensions swirling around in your own mind.

Even if you never reread a single word you’ve written, anything that helps you do a little processing and brings you a little clarity is worth a shot.

This column was originally published on Medium.