Grief doesn't follow a script. Whether you've lost someone suddenly or are navigating the slow unraveling that follows a major life change, it can be hard to find space for your emotions, let alone make sense of them. That's where journaling comes in. This commonly therapist-recommended tool has been shown to ease stress, clarify emotions, and support long-term healing. And, no, it doesn't have to be done daily to make a difference.
Writing can bring old memories to the surface with surprising clarity. You might worry that once you let your suppressed feelings surface, you'll feel overwhelmed by sadness, anger, or anxious thoughts and have no way to "turn it off." But I would encourage you to view it in a different way: writing to heal can show you how heavy a weight you've been carrying for far too long, and how much you deserve to finally set that weight down.
For almost five years, I've been dutifully drawing little green dots at the top of my journal entries. A small green dot means it was a generally good day, a slightly bigger one that it was pretty fantastic. A huge one represents one of the handful of no-notes, absolutely perfect days of the year. Orange dots equal stress, red denotes anger, and blue means feeling blue.
NTFSplus is an unexpected development because for about four years now, the Linux kernel has contained a read-write NTFS driver. It's called ntfs3 and it appeared in kernel 5.15 back in November 2021. It's called NTFS3 because it effectively replaced the old ntfs driver, which just offered read-only support, and ntfs-3g which works via FUSE - meaning that it runs as an ordinary, unprivileged userspace program, which imposes performance and other limitations.
Writing your thoughts down can help you gain some space from them, greatly reducing their emotional charge. You can notice what is actually going on in your mind and use this information to make concrete goals that will ultimately lead to more happiness. When you write a thought, ask yourself, "What is the need I am really feeling here? What am I wanting more of?"
Feelings come first today, quite literally, as you'll probably be swimming in them all morning. The moon enters its home sign of soft and sensitive Cancer during the wee hours, but immediately squares off with illusive Neptune. Is it intuition or anxiety? It's hard to say when you're surrounded by Neptune's disorienting fog. Grab a cup of coffee, ground yourself in reality, and trust your gut.
When I ask clients to imagine what they would say to a close friend in the same situation, their entire tone shifts. They speak with calm, empathy, and reassurance—the very things they struggle to extend to themselves.