Hi, my name is Penelope Falls, and this is just a small glimpse into how journaling has changed my life. I didn’t pick up a pen one day with dreams of writing beautiful things, creating poetry, or crafting a novel. I picked up a pen because I was desperate, desperate to feel better and stay sober. I want to share my journey with you in hopes that you too can find a path to a better understanding of not only yourself, but everything around you.
Many years ago, I found myself struggling with addiction to alcohol. After countless attempts to rid myself of needing alcohol to get through my days, I finally accepted a truth I’d been running from: I could not do it on my own. The shaking hands, the numbed emotions, the life that had shrunk down to nothing but the next drink, I needed help, and I needed it desperately.
The Search for Tools
I entered a recovery program, hoping someone there would have answers that I didn’t. My sponsor suggested several tools: meditation, exercise, group meetings, daily affirmations. I tried them all with varying degrees of success. But journaling was the one that stuck. Maybe because I could do it alone, in the safety of my own space, without having to perform or pretend I had it together. Just me and a blank page.
The first time I sat down with a notebook, I felt ridiculous. A grown adult, staring at empty pages like they would judge me for what I would write down. I was never much of a writer nor a reader, but I needed some way to release the emotions and thoughts that would send me spiraling down a rabbit hole and tempt me to pick up a drink to numb the pain and shame.
The Beginning
I had no idea what to write about. I sat there for a long time, overthinking it. Should I write a story? Lists? Goals? Should I write about how I felt? I was lost, and the blank page stared back at me. I felt like a deer in head lights with that blank stare, what do I do, where should I go?
Finally, I put pen to paper and started writing down whatever came into my head.
This became a conversation I would have with myself, except I wasn’t speaking out loud. Could you call it a diary? Maybe. I call it a dump of various thoughts that often don’t make sense all jumbled together, firing one after another in what seems like an eternity but in reality is only a few seconds.
The Chaos Inside
Those thoughts coming one after the other cluttered my mind. You know what I mean. Maybe you don’t. We rarely stop to notice how many thoughts race through our minds until we try to slow down and stop thinking. I remember when I first attempted meditation in recovery, I expected to find peace and quiet. Instead, I discovered an ocean of wave after wave of chaotic thoughts. Meditation showed me how many thoughts I had in a very short period of time. I thought I could not meditate because I could not turn the thoughts off. Turns out it is not about turning them off but noticing when the mind wanders into the thoughts and bringing our attention back to the present moment through our breath. More on that in another post.
Anyway, journaling worked the opposite way for me, instead of letting the thought go and returning my focus on my breath I focused on the thought and wrote it down. In other words I could let go of the thought by writing it down.
The Early Days: Pure Chaos
During my first weeks of sobriety, after the pink cloud phase, I was raw and irritable about everything. My mind was chaos, bouncing from resentments to errands to social obligations I didn’t want to fulfill. So when I started journaling, I didn’t filter these thoughts. I just let them spill onto the page.
One entry from early in my sobriety captures this perfectly:
“Ugh, why can’t Jen pick up after herself and it drives me nuts. How in the world can someone live like that? Did I buy laundry detergent? Oh crap, I need to buy some new pants for that party I’m supposed to go to. Do I really want to go to that party? I don’t know. A beer would shut this up. I should go shopping for a toaster. Toast is carbs don’t do that. But it tastes so good with some jelly, strawberry, no raspberry no…the snozberries taste like snozberries”
It began just like that. Some days I wrote “fuck you” and “fuck this” and “fuck that” for everything—fuck, fuck, fuck. If it was anger, I swore. If it was sadness, I poured my feelings out like a poet between tears.
Why This Matters
I know this sounds like a bunch of crap. Why write all of this down? Why not just think it and move on?
Here’s the reason: writing it down clears the clutter. And then, all of a sudden, something magical happens. One thought sticks. That thought turns into one paragraph, then two, then two pages, and before you know it, you’ve written everything you’ve felt, thought, and experienced around that one thought.
The jumble on the page starts to reveal patterns you couldn’t see when it was all spinning around in your head. Somehow physically writing with a pen slows those thoughts enough to put them on paper. Your brain works faster than your hand and so it has to slow down in order to write it. As those thoughts come and go only some make the page, of those that make the page something will stand out and that is when the magic begins.
The Breakthrough
For the first few weeks, my journaling stayed in the dump zone, complaints, to-do lists, profanity-laced rants about nothing and everything. I just kept showing up to that intimidating blank page and trusted the process even when it felt pointless. I showed up and dumped everything, if only, to occupy my hands and my mind. I had to focus on something other than the little voice that kept saying “we can end this right now and numb out.”
Then, about six weeks in, something happened.
I was dumping about something that reminded me of my childhood. Before I knew it I was writing about my childhood and how important sports were to me growing up. Soccer and basketball were my go-tos. I hadn’t thought about playing those sports in years, but as I wrote, I remembered the joy they brought me as a kid. I could even smell the grass on those late afternoon practices in early fall. I could see all the players and even taste the oranges we would eat at halftime.
The memories kept coming. Feelings about friends I was no longer in touch with surfaced. The choices I made back then. The grades I got. The wonderful relationship I had with my grandmother and how my Mother, who knew nothing about sports, attended every game.
I wrote pages. The more I wrote, the more I remembered about that time, details I thought I’d forgotten forever. Before I knew it, I had written about a friend I had a crush on.
What?
I stopped writing and reread what I’d just put on the page. I had never consciously realized that I had a crush on a girl back then. But as I unpacked the events, the way I acted around her, the way I felt when she talked to me, the confusion that churned in my stomach, the more my feelings took up space on the page.
And then, bam.
There it was: the first time I had a drink in high school. I wrote about all of the feelings I wasn’t supposed to have (the crush, the confusion, the shame about feeling different) and how they disappeared when I drank. That warm numbness replaced the uncomfortable truth. That was the beginning of my love affair with alcohol.
I had never realized I had that crush, nor had I ever put two and two together that my feelings for her impacted my behavior and my own self-esteem so much back then.
The Lightbulb
I sat there, staring at what I’d written, stunned. This wasn’t just a random memory, this was the origin story I’d never known I had. I wasn’t just an alcoholic who couldn’t control herself. I was someone who had learned, at fourteen years old, that alcohol could help me bury those uncomfortable and shameful feelings.
For years, I’d reached for a drink whenever I felt something I didn’t want to feel. Anxiety? Drink. Sadness? Drink. Attraction, confusion, shame, joy that felt too big to handle? Drink, drink, drink.
That realization changed everything. It didn’t cure me, recovery doesn’t work that way. But it gave me a map that helped to understand myself. And in recovery, understanding is half the battle.
Journaling became my excavation tool. Page by page, I could dig up the feelings I’d buried and look at them in the light of day. Some were painful. Some were beautiful. All of them, good or bad, deserved to be felt rather than numbed.
I”m Still Staring
I still journal today. I would love to say I do it everyday but I”m human and I skip days here and there. The majority of my entries are calmer and less chaotic. I still spin and procrastinate but as soon as I give myself the space to write I know I will get through the uncomfortable feelings a lot faster. My process is the same: free write , let it flow and see where it goes.
Sometimes it leads nowhere. Sometimes I write three pages about being annoyed at traffic.
But sometimes, often enough to keep me coming back, it leads me to a truth I didn’t know I was carrying. A memory I’d forgotten. A pattern I’d been repeating without noticing. A feeling I’d been too afraid to name.
The blank page is still intimidating sometimes. But now I know what it offers: a conversation with the parts of myself I’ve been too afraid to meet. A chance to understand rather than numb. A path back to myself.
If you’re struggling, if you’re in recovery, if you’re just trying to make sense of the noise in your head, maybe grab a notebook. Don’t overthink it. Don’t make it pretty. Just let it rip.
You might be surprised with the words of wisdom that poor out of your head and on to the page..