The Rewrite Journal
Is it possible to rewrite your life through the power of your own words?
If there’s one thing I love doing it’s challenging a narrative. Call it a rebellious spirit, I just can’t help it. But what about when that narrative is the one you’ve written yourself?
As an author, I create stories. Stories with villains and heroes. With success and tragedy. With love and heartbreak.
As a person, I am a story. In my version, I am the main character. In other people’s versions, I’m the trusted side-kick, the mentor, the tragic but necessary sacrifice, and even the villain.
As an author, I know that our stories are not as neat as fiction. We often don’t plot them the way authors do. Most of us are pantsing along as best we can.
Often, we’re so busy writing our life chapters that we can’t see the story it’s making.
Then maybe something surprises us, or falls apart, or unravels. We discover a painful plot hole. Or something huge is missing. Or we’re suddenly aware that the great quest we thought we were on has turned into a horror.
That can often be the most undermining, overwhelming moment of our lives.
The sense that the great story we thought we were writing no longer feels good to be in. And the awareness that it’s taken a huge amount of time and energy to get to this point and those things, time and energy, are not infinite. The thought of a huge edit, a major rewrite of the story, can feel impossible.
In that moment, how do you own the story you’ve got and move it toward the conclusion you want?
“Keep a diary, and someday it’ll keep you.”
If you’ve landed here from one of my other posts about journaling, you’ll know by now that I’m a big fan. Yes, I’m a stan.
I’ve been keeping a diary in one form or another since I was about 8 years old. My post How to write a journal… is based on the many forms of journaling I’ve tried over the years. But diary writing for me became a revolutionary tool for assessment and change in 2018.
Two years before Covid, during a painfully miserable time in my life, I took a solo road trip to Scotland and started a holiday journal while wild camping my way round the NC500 in a rather old VW T4.
The expected catharsis of writing a temporary diary exploded as rage recording. Page after page of intense misery. I began to reread my entries before writing the next, hoping to uncover with my trusty highlighter some common threads that might lead me out of the pit of doom.
By the time I returned home after ten solitary days, I had created a diary structure that was to completely reshape my life.
It’s helped me realise my life-long ambition to be a published author. Navigated the rapids of Covid and homeschooling. Supported me through separation from my long-term partner. Established a co-parenting partnership I remain proud of to this day. Showed me the deeply personal path toward my dream of being a writer that worked for me. It kept me upright when my ex-partner died by suicide, negotiating the trauma it caused our child, and the social isolation it threw us into. And it’s still guiding me, revolutionising my financial capacity in this new mode of solo parenting.
This diary is my superpower cloak. Because it harnesses the many benefits of different types of journaling.
There are four elements to The Rewrite Journal:
A wheel of emotional resonance quarterly check-in
A ‘rewrite’ checklist for focus and manifestation
A space for gratitude or abundance (our need changes according to our current circumstances)
The daily practice of exposition journaling for self-reflection
Here’s how it all fits together….
The Wheel of Emotional Resonance
A whole of unequal sums.
It is often true that our whole life is not unhappy and yet there is an element of dissatisfaction that can bleed into good areas.
Lots of happiness and well-being courses and therapists will start with this point. Asking you to ‘rate’ your life in different areas.
The Rewrite Journal takes this one step further, linking this system to an emotional register. Every quarterly Rewrite Journal begins with a Wheel of Emotional Resonance check-in.
The Wheel is separated into ten segments of life to rate from 1-10 on an emotional scale. You score these segments by the exact emotional value you experience when you consider that area of your life. This helps you to identify those areas of your life that are thriving and those that are being sabotaged by survival emotions. From this you can give your whole life health a % score. (Ten segments with ten levels is an easy wheel to convert to percentage, even for a maths-avoidant writer like myself.)
The Wheel helps you to understand why you may be knocking it out of the park in some ways and yet feel somehow a little ‘meh’ about your life. Or perhaps just too comfortable for your own good? It may surprise you to know that contentment is in the middle of the emotional register, right next to boredom. Stay too long in comfort mode and you risk slipping into dissatisfaction.
Assessing your whole life health in this way every quarter allows you to see if there has been much movement from the previous quarter. It also helps you identify the next step to take to elevate each area to its next emotional score. These next steps are crafted into statements that you will write and rewrite in the journal.
Rewrite encourages you to focus on the specific area of your life that is causing your lowest emotional register and lean into the discomfort this is causing. Survival emotions bring on survival strategies. Those fight/flight/freeze neurophysiological states that can be very hard to work our way out of.
It also encourages you to hold onto your success in individual areas of life as a way of not becoming overwhelmed by survival emotions.
It isn’t always easy to separate out the complexity of all that we are as people, and any system needs to have inherent flexibility for the true individuals that we are. As a writer who emphasises inclusivity it struck me that many emotional registers are founded on principles of privilege, whiteness, neurotypicality or heteronormativity. My register asks questions in a way that gives you the space to shape each segment to your own needs.
Daily Practice
Stack enough stones and you can move a mountain.
The power of good habit formation is about as well documented as it is hard to achieve. Good daily habits are not made overnight. If you’ve ever stacked stones you’ll know more fall over than stick and it’s as irresistible as it is frustrating.
The invincible daily habit of the Rewrite Journal is not actually daily. That’s the secret sauce.
I don’t aim for any daily habit to be actually daily because I have a neurodivergent brain that will be bored by that very fact. I fluctuate my daily practice according to the season. Whether it’s my diary habit, my wild swimming habit, my stretching habit, my book writing… I never thrive with repetition. I thrive on accretion. Every day that I can, I write my daily journal. If I cannot, I do not worry. Each day that I write, I focus on the moment.
What is today? Where I am today? What is my goal today?
I built this flexibility into the Rewrite Journal because I know that everyone has a busy life. If you set a goal too high, you’ll struggle to build it into your life. Rewrite encourages you to start with what you can manage and aim to increase. It also begins with the optimism that you can write every day, because each journal is 91 days long.
How does this actually work?
Rewrite your own story on a daily basis.
The Rewrite checklist.
Top left is the ten-point statement. The next place you’re aiming for in the ten areas of your Wheel or the current place you want to maintain.
Every day you write them out from memory. If you’ve achieved movement toward that statement in the preceding 24 hours, you highlight it. (I work on my diary first thing in the morning, which is why I rate the day before. It can work equally well done in the evening for the day just finishing.) Then you score how many out of 10 you’ve hit. 5/10 is a place of comfort. Anything below and you’re off course, time to address what’s going on.
Because it isn’t possible to move forward on ALL segments of your life equally, Rewrite gives you the flexibility to decide if some of those aspects of your life are doing well enough that you can maintain the current position.
It also asks you to choose just ONE segment of life that is your Current Focus.
Below your checklist, you write out this current focus for clarity, because it is always tempting to try and work on too many things at once. Keeping your eye on the clear goal gives you a stronger chance of moving toward it.
Alongside this vision is the need for embracing your successes.
Live your life always half full.
Gratitude is your journal vitamin.
Below the checklist and focus is a pause for gratitude. What is amazing, what is working, what gives you joy. The myriad ways in which life is working for you. Keeping the present as valued as the goals you’re working toward.
Gratitude has a proven track-record in changing the energy of your thoughts. Even if it’s a simple reminder to keep what you love present in your daily life, taking the time to write out what you are grateful for reminds you to seek it out in your daily life.
It is not an easy thing to face that gratitude may be out of reach at the start of your journal writing. It was one of the hardest areas for me to uncover when I began using it. For the first few months, coffee featured so heavily that it began to depress me. Now, even on my hardest days, when the energy to write other parts of the journal is low, I normally run out of space in my gratitude section and feel instantly uplifted.
Gratitude is the half-side of a coin however. There are times when gratitude for what you have can actually be limiting. Depending on the season of your life and the harshness of your challenges, there is a time to move towards embracing Abundance.
Visualise gratitude as a beautiful silver bowl of clear water, with multiple gorgeous blooms floating on the top for you to marvel at and protect. You keep the bowl steady and close as you peer into the details of those flowers.
Abundance is an open-arm stance. You are aware of beauty beyond your current situation that is flowing toward you, waiting for you to welcome it with open arms. Abundance asks that you focus on the wonderful things that are already moving toward you, as promise of even greater things set in motion that you cannot yet see.
Depending on my season, I shift between gratitude and abundance in my journal.
That’s half of a double spread. Space for your checklist, your focus and for gratitude/abundance. But what about the rest?
All the best stories need an element of mystery.
Let it drip.
On the right hand page is space for you to write freely.
Write to see what drips to the bottom of the page as being the thing you probably need to notice about your current self. Write it ugly, write it honestly, write it bleedingly, write it passionately. All emotions need to be honoured. Perhaps afterwards, you might circle a word or two and put that at the top of the next entry where there is a space for prompts. A kind of gentle nudge to explore.
Toward the bottom half of this page, in your final thoughts, turn toward manifestation. Who are you reaching toward in all this rewriting? What does that future look like in words to you?
The journal is designed to give you a double-spread per day. When you are done, close the book and get on with your day, surer that you’re living a life of choice, not reaction.
However… because we don’t thrive with rigidity… sometimes the second page needs more space. It needs to bleed across into another page, or two. All the marked notes in Rewrite are faded, so that you overwrite them to use the space if it takes a little longer for something to come into focus. This is the place where I have written out things like…
Nothing that was meant for you has missed you. Don’t waste time missing what was not meant for you.
If everyone else is apportioning blame, guilt becomes the default position. The easiest way to avoid guilt is to apportion blame.
Your true home is still waiting for you.
You’re growing forever closer to your truest self.
If you’re in a place where you feel unsure about yourself, or overwhelmed by the gap between what you want and what you’ve got, you can access the full transformative process I’ve used myself. The Rewrite Journal is a journal system than can actually change your life. It’s a gift from me to you. The gift I would have loved someone else to give me when I was really struggling. Sign up to my exclusive early bird club and I’ll keep you updated with all the news about when and how it’s releasing.