I write all the time — maybe too much — but it’s all for public consumption, be it here, at NBC or on social media. When you do that you tend to only write the good stuff and leave out the banal or the overly-personal or the simple. That’s essential when you’re writing for an audience, but it skews your view of yourself and your life when you look back. “Oh, man, I must’ve been on top of my shit that day!” I’ll say when looking at a good article I wrote for NBC or a Tumblr post. Never mind that my life was falling apart that day or what have you.

My therapist, after acknowledging that the last thing I need to do is to crawl into my own head too much, said that journaling would be good for me. Specifically journaling that is not meant to be seen by other people but, rather, just as a place for me to vent and process. And, of course, to record thoughts and feeling that I can revisit when that “everything was great six months ago and now life sucks!” revisionism starts to happen. “Hey, it sucked then too!” I’ll say happily to myself, knowing that my current misery has a lot of company. Or, maybe, I’ll appreciate that my life is generally pretty damn good and that I had merely been forgetting the good things. Crazier things have happened.

So I started a journal today. We’ll see how it goes. If anything worth publishing for the public spins out of it, all the better, but that’s not the point. So far I’ve written one entry and I already feel strangely better about my day. Maybe I’ll call my journal “The Placebo Effect.”