I don't know how I'm feeling until I write.

Autism, alexithymia, and journaling to understand.

Growing up, my journal felt like the only adult who listened to me.

My deepest, truest feelings were so wild and intense, they didn’t feel safe to share with a single person in my life.

Not my parents.
Not my friends.
Not even a therapist.

Writing is how I understand myself and my emotions. Being autistic with alexithymia, that struggle is tenfold. It’s so difficult for me to understand how I feel.

Am I angry?
Am I grieving?
Am I heartbroken?
Am I confused?
Am I just… hungry?

Is this a fresh hurt, or is it coming from an older memory, an earlier wound?

These questions swirl endlessly. To find the answers, I journal. I write. It takes so much untangling to find out. Pages and pages, just to feel a little less lost.

What do I need right now? How am I feeling? What’s wrong?

I don’t have an answer until I unspool it from my insides.
It takes time.

I’m grateful for patient friends and loved ones who give me the space to answer. Who show me that it’s possible for someone, or something beyond the page, to want to understand.

I’m grateful for the patience I’ve created within myself to wonder, and to ask.

I’m grateful to writing for helping me understand myself.

Journaling is the kind of writing that’s never asked me to mask or perform. I can just show up, however I am.

My first journal had a red-striped bag on the cover labeled “POPCORN” with a scratch and sniff sticker—buttered popcorn, of course. I scratched it until it didn’t smell anymore.

I’ve had so many since—ones with keys and locks, so my mom couldn’t read it. I caught her once, her head bent over my pages. A fancy digital one once after that—you were supposed to be able to give it a voice passcode, I think? But it never really worked like it was supposed to.

Leuchtturms and Moleskines and Scribbles That Matter and those beautiful, aesthetic journals you find at big bookstores. 70-cent spiral notebooks from Walmart with cheap paper. Composition books with the black and white covers. I’ve had so many, and I’m thankful for them all.

I haven’t been a daily journaler for most of my life. Journaling used to be a tool for emergencies. In case of fire, break glass. When something hurt, and I couldn’t figure out why.

In the last few years, since I started embracing my autism, it’s become more of a daily rhythm. I’ve noticed that the more I write, the more I discover about myself—the more awareness and understanding I can bring to what’s inside me. Writing keeps me connected to who I am: my thoughts, my ideas, my frustrations, my joys.

If my feelings are a tangled ball of yarn, journaling helps me untangle.

I like journaling. I like that it’s part of who I am. I like how my brain and body feel when I do. And I think that’s enough.

I don’t care if someone reads my journals anymore. I know they’re not all of who I am. They capture a moment, a fragment. We say a photograph can’t capture the fullness of a sunset. If that’s true, then one journal entry—or ten—or one hundred—cannot capture the immensity of your lived experience. I can only capture a moment in anything I write. Writing is the observation of your interior landscape. Memories, emotions, thoughts. Are they floating like clouds, or circling like pestering gulls? Images, sensations, textures, smells. You reach in, pull them out, and see what’s there. It’s not the truth of forever. It’s just your truth for now.

Your truth is, and has always been, worth witnessing.