Short Daily Update: If Writing is Therapy, Does This Newsletter Count as My Session?

Week 4 - Day 25 of notes, thoughts, and ramblings sometimes about AI

It’s day 25 of this newsletter, and for the first time, I spent more time than I’d like to admit staring at this blank page. I flipped through my Bank of Ideas notebook, hoping for inspiration, but nothing sparked. So, after too much digression, I’ll just accept that today’s newsletter is what it is: a brain dump, one sentence after the other. Just like a journal entry.

Will you stay with me?

I came across a story—you probably saw it too. An elderly woman, over 100 years old, who has been writing in her diary since she was 11. The photo accompanying the story showed a box filled with her journals, each one labeled with the year imprinted on the pages.

It reminded me of my own box. That I spent quite some time thinking about systems to organize it differently (or shall I say: organize, period.). But hers was so simple. I wondered: Could I make it to 100 writing every day? Could I even make it to 100?

That led me to think about the power of journals throughout history. But today, I don’t feel like doing a deep dive into research to impress you with smart things. So, instead, I’ll share three journals that came to mind. Feel free to fact-check me (or add more):

📖 Louis XIV, the Sun King – There’s a supposedly funny entry in his journal that says, “Today, I don’t feel like writing.” The irony? He still wrote. Maybe it’s so funny that it isn’t even true, but I like it anyway.

📖 Sophia de Mello Breyner’s father – I’ve told you about her before, she was a writer, and I read her biography over the summer. Her father kept a journal, documenting the state of the country. Before he passed, he asked his wife to continue writing. He understood the importance of recording history. A few weeks ago, I listened to a podcast that used his diary to explain the early 20th century. He was right: writing matters.

📖 Marcus Aurelius' Meditations – Would you call it a journal? Maybe, because it’s deeply introspective. He shares his own internal struggles and his attempts at self-improvement. But it’s not exactly a daily record, or even done in chronological order so… Maybe it’s not a journal. But it’s a testimony of how he shaped his inner world. Isn’t that a journal, after all?

And then I thought about prolific political writers—Winston Churchill, Alexander Hamilton—men who changed the course of their countries. Their words shaped history, and now we tell the stories of their nations through their point of view.

That’s when I realized that all of these journals belonged to men. Men who went down in history by documenting political shifts or shaping them.

Until I remembered the woman who started this whole train of thought. The one whose name I can’t even recall. The one who has been writing for 89 years.

She is all of us.

At some point, someone inspired us to pick up a pen, to put thoughts on paper. And we just kept going. Not because we were shaping nations. Not because we were trying to be remembered.

We write because it keeps us sane.
We write because it keeps us connected - to ourselves, and therefore to the world around us.

When I pick up my pen, I forget about being productive. I stop measuring time. I stop measuring anything. I press pause on the never-ending thoughts about making a living and, for a moment, I am just making texts come to life.

Writing exists outside of the currency of productivity. There’s no metric for a well-written sentence. No KPI for the depth of a thought. No OKR to get 70% better at words.

When I write, I’m not spending time; I’m inhabiting it.

There’s no pressure to extract value from every second. No expectation to turn words into something useful. Writing doesn’t demand efficiency, it asks for presence.

It’s the rare moment where I don’t have to justify my existence by what I produce.

I just write. And in that space, I simply am.

With no other goal than putting one word after another.

Maybe in the hopes that I’ll hear myself better. That I’ll be okay with the sounds in my own mind.

And that’s exactly what I did here today. Just like a page in a journal that I refuse to leave blank.

One sentence after another.

Thanks for joining me inside my head. That is probably not that different from yours. I hope you see that too. 💙