How to Make a Friend Journal

Every week, I send out a #WinWednesday email to the Win Wednesday tribe. After I sent out last week’s email about the importance of being your own friend and the “friend journal” that I started, I got a lot of requests.

How do you make a friend journal? What does it look like? Is it like any other journal? How often do you write in it? What do you write in it? How do you start?

For me, it all started with my “why”. Simon Sinek taught me that anything that lasts always has a solid “why”. You should have your own “why” for your reason to have a friend journal. Why have a friend journal? Well, I think that leads to a second, more important question:

Why do you want to be friends with yourself?

My “why” was birthed from an aha moment when I realized that I had started treating myself like a workhorse and I wasn’t making time to really nurture myself or to just play. So guess what, I had started treating all my other relationships as transactional things where I get what I need or I give whatever I need to give and I keep moving without getting too vulnerable.

I thought about my “why” for a friendship with myself and it was pretty simple — I want to be a good friend to myself so that I can be a much better friend to others. I want to learn how to love and accept myself as I am while also building myself up to become the best that I can be.

How often do you write in it?

You get to decide! My journal isn’t a daily journal, but I guess it could be. I think of my friend journal more like the travel journal that I have where I paste postcards in it and log every unique place I travel to with a little snippet about that place. I started keeping a travel journal 8 years ago when I was on my way to Japan. After all these years, it’s filling out really nicely and it’s so fun to look through it.

I picked my “friend journal” up at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but I didn’t start writing in it. I had it for a little while before I took a deep breath and started a conversation with myself. I’ll be honest with you, it felt really awkward at first.

Soooo, hi. Hi, friend journal. Not really sure what I’m doing here or where this is going but uh, well, here I am.

Now I try to make time at least once a week to sit down and write in my friend journal but sometimes more time goes by. Maybe I should write in it more often, but hey, the best friendships I have are the ones where we can pick up right where we left off. ;) But this leads me to the next point…

Make time for yourself.

This is important. You can’t have any friendship without making time for it. How much time do you take each week for yourself, outside of the necessary time that you already spend taking care of your body?

One of the first things I realized after I made my friend journal was that I rarely make quality time for myself. When I was a girl, I made myself get over things quickly. But of course, I wasn’t truly “over” anything. My hurts started getting infected underneath the bandaids that I slapped on top of them.

Even though resentment grew in the back corners of my heart, I acted like I was fine. This is a toxic way to live. If you’ve done this too, you’re not going to be able to clear out all the resentment and toxic thought patterns overnight, but you can start with simply making time for yourself to enjoy life. Enjoying your life starts putting more good things in your life, which naturally gives less room to negativity.

At first, making time for yourself is like opening the blinds in a house and letting the sunshine in. Then, you see that a vase of flowers would look really nice on the end table beside the sofa, so you go out and pick some and enjoy the way it feels to take a walk. Later, you open the blinds again and think about how fun it would be to snuggle up on that sofa and read a book so you find a few moments to read.

Maybe it won’t always feel or sound that romantic to make time for yourself, but you get the idea. When you make time to write in your friend journal, you’ll automatically be more intentional about looking for other ways to be a good friend to yourself.

Schedule special friend dates… with just you.

Take yourself out on a date and take your journal along. Write about the moments you experience as you’re right there. Write about how the atmosphere feels, what you smell, and who is in the room. Write about random interactions with strangers. Write about the things that you admire about your surroundings.

I personally love taking myself out to a nice pub in the middle of a week when very few people are around. I sip a drink slowly and watch as people come and go. I close my eyes just to feel what it feels like in my body when I’m taking deep breaths in and out.

The first time I took myself on a date like this, I felt self-conscious. I wondered if people would wonder why I was there alone. But then I just relaxed and let myself enjoy it.

No bullying allowed!

Boy. This is a huge one. Let’s end bullying.

It’s something that every parent has to face with their kids, on some level. None of us want to hear that our kid has been bullied or that they were a bully to someone else.

I was listening to my friend and parent coach, Janice Resendez, and she was doing a podcast interview. The way to end bullying starts with compassion. Know how to have compassion with yourself, first.

Janice was talking about how important it is to practice compassion with our kids when they’re having a bad day. She used the example that when we work in an office and someone who’s usually happy starts acting strange or negative. We automatically wonder what’s going on to cause their behavior and we may ask them if they’re okay. She encouraged this same approach with kids. Instead of shutting kids up or controlling their behavior, find out why they are acting out.

Then she took it a step further and suggested that we need to practice this type of compassion with ourselves. The way to end bullying in a family dynamic starts with parents who refuse to bully their children because they refuse to bully themselves.

Do you bully yourself? Are you in any relationships where you allow others to bully you?

A good friend doesn’t intentionally insult you or make snarky comments about your sensitive areas. A good friend would never tell you that you’re too __(fill in the blank)___ to be loved or valued or liked. So why would you do or say these things to yourself?

Don’t be a bully to yourself.

Stop picking your scabs.

Maybe you don’t pick your scabs like I do. When I was in Paris this summer, I had a huge zit right under my nose that finally popped. (It was so satisfying.) Then it started healing. It looked awful so I was putting makeup on top of it every day and it would get so crusty and then I would start to pick at it and it would start bleeding. Is this TMI? Too bad, true friends talk about anything and everything girlfriend, hehe.

One morning I took a shower and noticed that this area was getting so irritated because I wouldn’t leave it alone. Stop picking your scabs, I told myself.

I started thinking about how I pick the scabs of my emotional wounds. I thought about how I rehash things that have happened that hurt me. I thought about how I don’t allow myself to let something go that I have already dealt with and need to move on from.

Your friend journal shouldn’t be a place for you to rehash things that you’re bitter about. Use another journal for that purpose. Because, think about it, if you’re venting to someone ALL THE DANG TIME, they get tired of that constant negativity. So does your mind! Focusing on things that hurt you without resolving them and moving on will create a lot of toxicity for you.

You have to learn how to stop picking at those areas that make you bleed again. Give yourself time to heal.

Now, with this being said, it’s absolutely really important and helpful to speak to a professional counselor or therapist to help you work through a painful hurt or trauma. Having regular maintenance sessions is important, too.

Shoot, I’ll be real — I have to have regular appointments because I derail quickly without them. I have my next appointment with my therapist at 11:00 a.m. this morning. I talk to her at least once or twice a month. I know I currently have some things to work through and I need a healthy perspective on all of it, as well as getting that accountability to do the next right thing.

“You are laughing and very brave.”

After I got back from Europe, I opened my email one morning to see the review that Monsieur Francois left on my Workaway profile, about our stay with him and his wife in the countryside of France.

He described my sister and me as “laughing and very brave”. I loved that. Then I saved it in my journal. That compliment was like the final sip of rosé as the sunset over an unbelievable summer in Europe.

Have you ever gotten a compliment that you remember forever? Your friend journal is a great place to write down great compliments that you get from others! It’s also a good place to give compliments to yourself.

More ways to use your friend journal:

• Write a fun little note… to yourself, in your friend journal.
• Get a thoughtful little gift… for yourself, then write about it in your friend journal just like you might if a friend had given you something. Write about why you picked it out and why it means something to you. Thank yourself for the gift!
• When you reach a goal or make it through a whole day without being a bully to yourself, give yourself an actual gold star or sticker or high five in your journal.
• Cry when you feel sad and confide to yourself about why something makes you feel so terribly sad. When you know you need a good cry, watch a sad movie and bring your friend journal along with you so you can write about it if you want to or you can simply write down that you watched the movie.
• Get mad. Sometimes you need to get mad. This is not the same as picking old scabs. Your friend journal is a safe place to get really mad and then let that anger go!
• Walk by a mirror and notice something that you like about yourself and then write about it. Shoot, even if all you can find to like is that tiny speck of color in your one eye then write about that. Start there and then make yourself appreciate more things about yourself. You’ll get better and better at it, I promise. ;)
• Turn some of the pages of your friend journal into scrapbook pages and doodle pages where you just enjoy collecting memories or doodling randomness. Have fun with it!

Your journal might not fill up quickly. It might be slow going. You might forget about it and then find it again. That’s okay. That’s part of the process. Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Pick up where you left off. Mark each small win, one at a time. This is not a sprint, this is a marathon. It takes a lifetime to really learn how to be a good friend… to yourself and to others.

You are more amazing than you know.

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