Blank Page Anxiety
and the journal with no blank page
The journal is open. The pen is ready, or the cursor is blinking, and the page just sits there. An ordinary Tuesday doesn’t feel like enough to write about, so the journal goes back on the shelf.
That’s blank page anxiety, and it ends a lot of journals by week two. The page is asking for more than an ordinary evening has.
Your memories come back
Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.
- a week later
- a month
- three months
- six months
- a year
- every year after
little memory
now
Exactly 1 year ago
Walked the long way home for no reason.
Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.
The page asks too much
An open page comes with an invisible standard: whatever you write should fill it, and should be worth reading someday. Most evenings can’t manage that, and they shouldn’t have to. Your day doesn’t need to be summarized or made meaningful by 11pm. It happened, and that is enough to write down.
Shrink the page to a line
Little Memory is an iPhone app, and its whole answer is size: one sentence counts. There’s no page to fill. The entry is a single line about something that happened, and it takes about fifteen seconds. You can write it tired, and you can write it about a sandwich. Bus was late. Bought stamps. The jasmine by the door finally opened. Nobody is grading it. (This is what micro-journaling means, and there’s a five-step way to start if you want one.)
Or skip the page entirely
Some nights, even opening an app is a page of its own. So Little Memory comes to you instead: a reminder email arrives in the evening, and replying to it saves the entry. You’ve answered a lot of emails. None of them felt like a blank page.
Mindful, simplistic and stirring. Highly recommended for those wishing to document rarities and events without much fuss.
HayleyLannister, App Store Review
The ordinary day is enough
Write down what happened and leave the meaning out: the leftover curry, the neighbor’s new dog, the bus that was on time for once. A year later that plain little line comes back to you, and it means more then than it possibly could tonight.
(If it’s less that the page frightens you and more that you just don’t enjoy writing, that has its own page too.)
There’s also a longer, more personal essay about the fear of journaling and the blank page on the developer’s blog. It starts with writing “I’m stuck.” Or take the little tour.
