February Journaling Prompts

Was January a mess? Use these prompts to (not so gracefully) get your cute ass mentally on track (or just off the ground).

January did not go as expected.

Oops.

I suppose by now I should know that life rarely does (or is it just mine?). I’ve done a lot of work in therapy to remain unattached to outcomes. I create a goal, hold the vision, and trust the process. This has tempered many disappointments and created opportunity for the unexpected: sometimes an even better outcome than I could have imagined occurs when I let go of what I think will happen.

Still, there are times when life takes a super wrong turn, and the end result is more like a cluster of pot holes and a broken carburetor. (Also what is a carburetor? And why is it always used in breakdown metaphors? Should my 34-year-old ass know this by now?)

This month I took several super wrong turns.

One could say I totaled my metaphorical vehicle. I had plans to work abroad for 6 months, send queries to literary agents for memoir #2, build my Substack, and finish my masters degree. But my mental health had other plans, and after just one week into January, my depression and eating disorder symptoms were so bad that I decided to fly home, move in with my dad, and try to figure out my life.

This is not the first time I’ve been in a rebuild. I have had to rebuild many times because of my mental health.

You can learn more about my eating disorder, depression, divorce, and the pot holes I’ve filled along the way in my memoir, Where the River Flows.

February, for me, feels like rebuilding. Like looking at the holes in the road and asking, “what the fuck happened,” and “do I start with the holes in the road or my damn carburetor?” and " “who can I call to help/do I EVEN HAVE CELL SERVICE OUT HERE?”

If you’d like to join me, my journaling exercise to plan and rebuild is below.

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