I have an entire book case of journals. Different colors for different reasons… Dream’s, (both good and bad) Negative symptoms, positive symptoms, ponder topics, delusions, drugs diaries, art, personal history, and of course… kidnapper prevention training. (the things I used to make my young siblings do to avoid kidnappers who were never there…)
Do other people journal compulsively and when you go back and re-read it all, does it give you insight or just make you shake your head and wonder?
No but during my episode I had a compulsive desire to write. I read somewhere its called hypergraphia. Look into it 
I journal almost every day. I write about what I’ve done that day, what symptoms I’ve encountered, how I solved problems. For me, it’s very therapeutic to get it all out.
And I usually go back and re-read it all at least every 4 months. It helps me gauge how I’m doing. And it helps me learn how to deal with symptoms and stressful situations, by seeing how I managed those.
I had 6 years worth of journals where I was extremely symptomatic. I would read those and feel unsettled and a bit anxious. There was nothing insightful or therapeutic about them. So I burned them.
I have enough to worry about without dragging up negative emotions from the past!
My journal entries now are much more positive and helpful.
Blessings,
Anthony
I have a few I’m trying to get ready to burn. The kidnapper prevention training is the one I’m having the most trouble with. If my siblings ever really did what I trained them to do, they would most likely be in jail. But so much of myself went into those pages. At the same time, nothing lucid or helpful has come out of them.
I journal in my daily moods, symptoms ad sometimes what I accomplished for the day. It helps me sort things through.
For years I was a compulsive list-maker. I would go through and throw them out every few months and now, years later, it’s hard to remember what they were all about. Usually they were analytical lists about what I was reading, or the nature of the mind, or just human nature I think. They were symptomatic of the depressive/obsessive side of my SZ. I really enjoyed doing them at the time but now I’m glad they’re gone and that my ideas seem more complex and human to me these days.
i’ve been journaling too but i started realitively recently. I have a hard time reading the past entries though. I just keep going with the future! it’s not compulsive though.
having just read your other post, how about a book on how to fix things, and ’ i don’t know like how to fix a door after i have taken an axe to it ! '.
take care
Keep them all. Don’t burn them.
In 10 years you probably will be able to read them more clearly.
I write a lot too. If I don’t I go crazy, probably why I had my most recent episode. Anyway I’ve burned lots of artwork and writing that only caused me pain. It’s therapeutic and I’ve read about when creating a positive living environment to get rid of or destroy things that you have a negative emotional attachment to. Just not good to keep around. Seeing it burn is a way to let go watching it turn to smoke and ash. I’ve had therapy where I write down all of the negative habits and thoughts I have, then burn it. It’s a way to train the mind to recognize these thoughts patterns etc, and then burn them into smoke (mentally) preventing you from attaching obsessing and repeating. One therapist told me she surrounds those thoughts in a bubble and shoots them into space. My mind obsesesses on that thought that its still active in some form out there so I envision them being burned gone forever to never appear in any reality ever again. Kind of off topic at the end there but its really helpful. I need to do it more myself!! Good luck!
Hmmm. I filled a 100 page notebook every 10 days around the time my 1st husband left for 5 months. Had kept random notebooks few years before. Think I kept them up until 2005, then after discovering my (ex) had been making copies of pages out of them for various people, including my pdocs, I switched to datebooks. Last year in fit of rage (believing these datebooks had a lot of info rewritten into misinfo to mess with me-how else would have friends and family names been spelled wrong and pertinent dates been off? Anyway in a monster rage I took all 10 (years) books and shredded them leaving me in a chest high pile of criss-cross shreds and a burnt out motor on the shredder. I killed the poor shredder. Somewhere, there are digital pictures of me swimming in a room full of shred.
Do I regret doing this?
No, because all it did was make me angry everytime I read them.
Still haven’t gone through those other journals, in no hurry, and might suffer the same fate.