Last year I read the book “Turn Your Pain Into Art” by Ariel Bloomer, and just recently I got around to actually doing the journal prompts.
Ariel Bloomer is the lead-singer and front woman of the band Icon For Hire. She also had an YouTube channel called the REL Show. The majority of content and work centers around mental health. The book is one part biography and one part personal development.
Ariel spends the first half of the book taking about her up bringing and the earlier years of Icon for Hire. The second half is spent connecting the events of the first to a wider audience, along with suggestions on work on that topic. Journal prompts are found at the end of most chapters, serve to help the reader practice skills learned in the chapter.
Writing, journaling and the arts as a whole have always been an outlet for me. That being said the daily practice of journaling has alluded me for a few year now. My sophomore year in high school I journaled nearly every day and that has dwindled dramatically over the past three years.
Watching something you did religiously slowly fade from conscious is hard. I have a pile of blank journals sitting in my closet right now, just begging to be filled up. But sometimes other things just get prioritized and we fall out of habits. The hardest part of it for me was that journaling really helped work through a lot of emotions and helped me to feel like I had a grasp on my emotions and my life.
That grasp on my life is something I haven’t felt for a while. My life has changed a lot over the past year and at times it has felt like nothing is really mine, It has felt like life was happening to me, instead of me happening to life. It has felt like emotions were having me instead of me having emotions.
Its been rough in a way that nothing has been rough for me before.
So, among other things to get myself through this I am picking up journaling back up again. I am planning on trying a bunch of other stuff too, but it is always easier to start an old habit up again then to start a brand new one.
The journal prompts in “Turn Your Pain Into Art”, have really helped me. It didn’t feel like starting from ground zero. I liked having the guidance and something to focus on in my writing. Once I worked through the ones in the book I was able to find some other ones on Pinterest. For me the prompts are helpful to keep going with the practice. It’s nice to know that if I have something to get off my chest I have a space for it and if I don’t I still have something to work on.
What I really got out of the journal prompts from “Turn Your Pain Into Art” was I know what I want. A lot of the prompts I have been working with lately have been focused around finding yourself and connect with your inner self. And I keep feeling like I am repeating myself. When they ask my goals it all sounds a like. When I write about my insecurities and what I want to work on, its all the same.
Which just goes to show, you know more about yourself then you think. Even when you think you don’t have grasp on your life, you do.
