A journal is a conversation with a version of you that doesn’t exist anymore. Keep one.

Writing things down preserves a person you will otherwise lose track of completely. Memory rewrites the past to match who you are now, so without a record you end up believing you always thought what you currently think. A page from four years ago is the only honest witness to that earlier self.

Keep it small enough to survive, three lines about what happened and what is worrying you. Skip days without guilt. The value is not in the writing, it is in having something to read in a decade.