You're not bad at journaling.

You got handed a blank page and zero instructions, which is a rough way to start literally anything. Nobody teaches this part. So — hi. I'm going to teach you this part.

Grab the five prompts I give everyone who says "I don't know what to write." Plus the Blah, Blah, Blah Method, which sounds fake and works every time.

It's never what you think it is...

Nobody quits journaling because they're lazy. Here's what actually happens:

"I don't know what to write."

The number one reason. Also the easiest one to fix — see below, it's embarrassingly simple.

"I skipped four days, so I ruined it."

You did not ruin it. There is nothing to ruin. There's no streak here; no app sending you passive-aggressive reminders.

"I don't have time."

Two minutes. Less time than you'll spend tonight scrolling Netflix and then watching nothing.

"My handwriting is bad, and my thoughts are boring."

Same. Mine too. Keep going anyway.

The trick I learned at sixteen from Miss Hicks

✦ I needed one more fine arts credit to graduate HS. I couldn't sing. I'd already taken art, so I took creative writing. Every class started with five minutes of free writing, and every class I sat there with...nothing.

✦ So she taught us this: If you don't know what to write, write the words blah, blah, blah until you can't stand it anymore.

✦ It works because you get bored. Then annoyed. Then you write something like "this is so stupid, why am I even doing this" — and about four seconds later, out comes the actual thing you needed to say. Every single time. Twenty-plus years later, and I still use it.

✦ That's the whole method. That's it. There's no app.

Hi, I'm Krystal. The girl who teaches people how to journal.

I've been writing in notebooks for twenty-plus years, and not in a serene-morning-light, matcha-and-linen way. In a "pen from the junk drawer before the kids wake up" way.

The notebooks have also carried the unglamorous stuff — a car wreck at seventeen, my parents' divorce in my late twenties, a job that was slowly killing me inside, the first terrifying year of working for myself, and the newborn months where I couldn't have told you what day it was.

I'm not a therapist. I'm not going to tell you journaling fixes anything. It just gives you somewhere to put it all down so you're not carrying the entire thing around in your head.

However you arrive, you’re welcome here.

Let's take a breath and begin again. Five prompts, the Blah Blah Blah Method, and a Thursday email that reads like a text from a friend who overshares.

Already journaling and want structure?

The First 30 Pages is thirty days of prompts, four ways to never face a blank page, and a checkbox grid that doesn't shame you for gaps. → Learn more here.