To celebrate a year of the Isolation Journals, we’re inviting you to join us in a 30-day journaling challenge for the month of April. For some extra inspiration, we’ll be sending you three prompts each week. Then in May, we’ll return to our regular Sunday newsletter.
Exactly one year ago, I started the Isolation Journals in my parents’ attic.
We were still in the very early days of the pandemic and were just beginning to glimpse the enormity of what lay ahead—all the fear, uncertainty, loss, and grief. The scope and scale was overwhelming, and to make sense of it, I turned to the ritual that’s always helped me through hard times: journaling.
That more than 100,000 people from all over the world joined me: it’s still astonishing. Creativity became our tool for survival. Small daily acts accrued into something much bigger. Our stories of vulnerability became stories of resilience and strength, and they united us.
It’s been stunning to see this community—this extraordinary, generous, thoughtful community—respond to the hardest time in our collective lives with millions of creative acts. The other day, I came across this tweet from the great Cheryl Strayed, and I thought—that’s us. That’s the Isolation Journals in a nutshell.
To commemorate what we’ve endured together, and to celebrate what lies ahead, we’re declaring April the month of journaling. Nobody asked us to—but I’m pretty sure we’re going to need it.
Though the pandemic isn’t behind us, we see glimmers of hope that our lives will soon take more familiar shapes—yet a part of me feels anxious about reentry. After such a profound interruption, we need something to help us bridge the distance between no longer and not yet. So I’m making a pact to journal every day for the next thirty days—and once again, I’m inviting you to join me.
The Month of Journaling
How it will work:
Commit to journaling every day for the month of April.
Keep it simple. Here’s how I’m approaching it: Set a timer for 10 minutes and write first thing in the morning (after coffee; we’re not monsters). Doesn’t matter the length, doesn’t matter the quality.
Feel free to interpret “journaling” however you’d like—in words, watercolors, music. Whatever form calls to you.
If you’d like to share your work, you can do so in our Facebook group, here on Substack, or on Instagram (be sure to tag @theisolationjournals, and to use the hashtag #TheIsolationJournals).
To inspire your practice, this month we’ll send you some of our all-time favorite prompts from our archive on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in addition to Sundays. (After April, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled weekly newsletter.) These prompts speak to this exact moment—to the arrival of spring and the more metaphorical changing of the season, as the world begins to open up and we begin this process of reentry.
Below you’ll find a prompt from our very first guest contributor—the New York Times-bestselling author and my brilliant and hilarious pal, Nora McInerny.
Let’s do this!
Suleika
DAY 1 of 30. “How are you, really?” by Nora McInerny
How are you?
A few weeks ago, no matter who asked, you’d have probably said “fine,” and then kept walking down the hall even if your world was fully falling apart on the inside.
We’re all… not fine right now. We know that, right? Or, do we?
My podcast, Terrible, Thanks for Asking came from a rejected book title and from an aspirational response to the question we ask and answer a million times a year without even thinking about it. A question we ask without intention and answer with white lies even when we are at our husband’s funeral.
An unnamed publisher (cough: HarperCollins) thought it was just too negative for a memoir about losing my husband to brain cancer.
In my household, which now includes a blended family of four children and a second husband, the only f-word in our house is fine. If I ask how you are, or how your day was, you can say anything but fine. That does mean we’ve gotten some “feedback” from the Lutheran preschool about our toddler’s language. And it also means that we’re a little more emotionally honest with one another.
Your prompt for today:
Put yourself in a moment where you were not fine. Maybe you were terrible, and maybe you were TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE. Put yourself back in that moment when you lied. Why did you do it? Whose feelings were you trying to save? Write what you wish you would have said, and imagine where that honest conversation could have led you.
One Last Thing…
Our prompts will always be free, and all are welcome.
But if you have the means, we’re humbly asking you to consider becoming a paying subscriber. Over the last year, I’ve worked with the most incredible team of women to nurture this project, sourcing over 145 beautiful prompts from the most extraordinary people I could find, and coming up with new and exciting ways to build community. It’s been a labor of love but also a whole lot of labor.
Our hope is to continue to do this work—because isolation did not start with the pandemic, and it will not end with it. More and more, isolation is a feature of modern life. We want to continue providing opportunities for reflection, connection, and inspiration. We want to continue creating with you. Because as our friend Elizabeth Gilbert says, a creative life is an amplified life.
I do this work because I know it works, and it’s necessary. Here, we create ourselves. Here, we write our way through.
I’m an Addiction Medicine physician and I via telehealth in TN. Most of my patients are not vaccinated for COVID19. Yesterday I spoke with one patient who’s 42 year old son in law died of COVID19. She scoffed that he died of pneumonia not COVID19 and they’re just blaming COVID19. Then another patient told me they’d had four family members die of COVID19 but they still won’t get vaccinated. I’ve seen a shift over the past few weeks. More people are getting vaccinated but not nearly enough. I had a colleague who made fun of a patient who had COVID19 to other staff, made a joke about a patient being lazy and not coming into the office because they were “hacking up a lung.” This pivot towards sanity is really hard for those who followed an insane bigot in the White House blithely for five years. Thanks for speaking truth to power. And thanks to Soledad O'Brien for always backing sanity over all the crazy. Ida Santana, MD