Retainer Pain and Journaling
I just finished my shower and journaling for the night and I was left with some thoughts that I wanted to jot down before going to sleep. Perhaps to be expanded upon in future posts.
My retainer doesn't hurt my teeth anymore. Last Thursday (5 days ago), I put it in for the first time in nearly 3 weeks and it was moderately painful. The next day, it was uncomfortable and distracting. I diligently wore it each night until last night I noticed that it felt fine again. Healthy habits can feel painful at first but eventually fade into the background of our routines, leaving behind only their compounding benefits.
After writing that paragraph, I realize now that the two topics that I thought were unrelated turned out to be quite thematically linked after all.
The second thing on my mind after my shower was my daily journaling routine. I've been keeping a daily log of activities and thoughts since the spring of 2022. I have periods where I do journal each day and periods where I journal retroactively, but the constant thing is that each day gets roughly one page and at the very least, on rare occasions, a couple sentences. I'm not even sure exactly why I maintain this habit, but I know that I don't want to stop. I have the entry from the day that I met my lovely partner and an entry from the day that I graduated college. In a equally fun way, I have entries from every day in between where nothing monumental happened. I love that I have entries from each day on my senior trip to Japan.
I used to only journal when I had strong feelings to let out, giving me a skewed (yet entertainingly melodramatic) journal from high school. The daily journal routine captures the more mundane aspects of life.
I think the reason why I like my daily journal and want to keep the routine up is because I'm a deeply nostalgic and sentimental person. I know that I can't possibly capture everything I experience in a day, but having even a tiny record of one thing I thought about or did on any given day is comforting. Even before I started my daily journal, I often thought back to my younger self and marveled at the invisible passage of time. Now I can literally flip back the pages and see something I wrote on that day (or close to it) about what I thought was interesting enough to record. It's a fascinating artifact and a gift I give to my future self every time I sit down to write.
[ Reply by email ]
Previous |