For over twenty-five years now, I’ve kept some form of journal. There were periods where I wrote every day, and periods where months passed between entries. Certain journals are full of ideas for books and lectures; others read more like field reports from difficult years of my life. Somehow, through every change in identity, work, relationship, ambition, and worldview, the practice itself remained.
Recently, while preparing the material for my new programme, Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives, I’ve found myself revisiting some of those older notebooks. I think many creatives underestimate how much of artistic practice is actually listening. Not performing; not producing. Listening.
There is also something important about the physicality of journaling. In a life spent increasingly online, notebooks retain texture and atmosphere. They carry evidence of particular moments. Different handwriting during stressful periods. Coffee stains. Pressed tickets from research trips. Shopping lists next to existential reflections. They become strangely human documents. People imagine diaries as places of confession, but often they reveal us indirectly: through repetition, obsession, avoidance, imagery, tone. Reading old entries now, I can often tell what I was unable to admit simply by noticing what I kept writing around.
This is one of the reasons I believe journaling is especially important for creatives. Creative people need spaces where they are allowed to be unfinished. Where ideas can remain embryonic. Where the inner voice can speak before it becomes polished into communication. Over the past year especially, I’ve become more aware of how many intelligent, capable, deeply creative people feel internally scattered. They consume constantly but rarely metabolise experience. They produce work but struggle to hear themselves beneath the noise of expectation and comparison.
Journaling is not a magical solution to this. But it is a stabilising practice. A way of remaining in conversation with your own life. And importantly, it does not require you to be “good” at writing. That has been very present for me while developing Returning to Yourself. More than anything, I wanted the programme to create a space where creatives could encounter themselves again outside performance, productivity, and pressure. Not another course about branding or output, but a gentler and more reflective practice of creative attention.
The older I get, the more I think creativity depends less on intensity than on sustained relationship with one’s own inner life. The journal becomes part of that relationship. A witness to change. A container for uncertainty. A place where the self can continue speaking across years.
And if this resonates, you’re warmly invited to join Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives
Mondays 7.30–9.00pm UK time beginning 15 June | £60
Register here: Returning to Yourself: A 4-Week Journaling Circle for Creatives
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