Your Story Has Been Waiting for You: Why Journalling Matters
You Don't Have To Be A Writer To Journal. You Don't Even Have To Like Writing.
A quiet case for putting the thoughts that have been waiting somewhere they can finally be seen.
There's a moment a lot of us have had.
You're driving home. You're folding washing. You're standing in the shower. And something rises up. A feeling. A memory. A thought you didn't know you were carrying.
You push it back down. Because you're busy. Because it's not the right time. Because you don't really know what to do with it.
That thought doesn't go away. It just waits.
This is where journaling comes in. Not the pretty kind with calligraphy and gratitude lists. The real kind. The kind that gives you somewhere to put the thoughts that have been waiting.
What journaling actually does
When something happens to us, our brain takes that experience and puts it somewhere. Sometimes that place is messy. The memory is there, but it's tangled up with feelings, with bits we didn't understand, with parts we never said out loud.
Writing helps untangle it.
When you put words on a page, something quiet happens. The thoughts that were spinning slow down. The feelings that were big get smaller — because they have a shape now. You can look at them.
You don't have to fix anything. You don't have to make sense of it all in one sitting. You just have to put it somewhere outside your head.
What the research says
Decades of studies, beginning with psychologist James Pennebaker, have shown the same thing again and again: people who write about meaningful experiences report feeling clearer, sleeping better, and understanding themselves more. But you don't need a study to tell you. You'll feel it the first time you do it.
Why it matters more for the big stuff
Most of us, if we journal at all, journal about small things. A bad day. A weird interaction. What we ate.
But the moments that change us — the ones we carry for years — those are the ones that need somewhere to land most of all.
Big experiences are slippery. They're too big to fit into a conversation at dinner. Too complicated for a quick text to a friend. So they stay inside us, half-processed, popping up at strange times.
A birth. A loss. A move. A relationship ending. A new role. A diagnosis. A goodbye.
These are the experiences that shape who we become. And if we don't give them space to be felt and understood, they shape us in ways we don't get to choose.
Writing about them isn't dwelling. It's the opposite.
It's how you stop carrying it like a stone in your pocket and start carrying it like a story you understand.
It can be so much simpler than you think
Here is the thing journaling can be — and what it doesn't have to be.
It doesn't have to be
Any of this.
- Daily
- Long
- Pretty
- Clever
- Coherent
It can be
Any of this.
- One sentence
- A list of feelings
- A single question answered
- A scribble in the margins
- A rant nobody will ever read
Some of the most powerful writing happens when you set a timer for five minutes and just go. No editing. No fixing the spelling. No making it sound nice.
If you don't know where to start, try this.
Try this prompt
"What I haven't said about this is…"
Then keep going.
And then there is motherhood
If you are a mother, you have lived through one of the biggest identity shifts a human can experience.
There's a word for this shift. Matrescence. It was first named by anthropologist Dana Raphael, and the framework was developed further by Aurélie Athan. It describes the process of becoming a mother — the way every part of you changes, not just your body. The way you become a different person.
We talk a lot about the baby. We don't talk much about the woman.
But she went through something massive too. She gave birth. She didn't sleep. She figured it out as she went. She felt joy and grief in the same breath. She missed who she used to be while loving who she was becoming.
And then, often, she didn't say any of it out loud. Because everyone wanted to know how the baby was sleeping.
This is where your story has been waiting.
It doesn't matter if your baby is six weeks old, six years old, or sixteen years old. The brain changes from pregnancy are real, and they last. Research shows changes that persist for at least six years, and likely far longer. Your story doesn't have an expiry date. It hasn't gone stale. It's still in there, waiting for you to come back to it.
From Jade
An honest thing I want to say.
I'm an Accredited Mental Health Social Worker. I've sat with hundreds of mothers across thousands of hours. I know a lot about how women process big experiences.
And I still didn't write my whole birth, postpartum and recovery story straight away.
I knew it had affected me. I knew there were parts of it I hadn't looked at. But I kept being busy. I kept being the support person for everyone else. I told myself I was fine because I was functioning.
When I finally sat down and started writing, I cried. Not because it was sad. Because it was finally being seen — by me. By the only person who had been there for the whole thing.
I had been waiting for myself to come back. I just didn't know it.
That was, honestly, the real origin story of Your Mama Journey.
What I hear from mothers
A story I think about often
A woman came to me not long after I had returned to work from maternity leave. Her child was eight. She wasn't in crisis. She wasn't in therapy for a specific thing. She just had this feeling that something was off, and she couldn't name it.
When we got into her birth story, it was the first time she'd ever spoken it out loud in detail. She kept apologising. "It was so long ago." "I should be over it." "Other people had it worse."
She wasn't broken. She was unfinished. An open loop that was showing up in different moments of her life. She had never been given the space to look at what had happened to her.
We worked through it. She started writing. Just a few minutes here and there. Not every day.
A few months later she told me:
"I feel like I've come home to myself."
She didn't need fixing. She needed her own attention.
Your story has been waiting for you
You don't need permission to do this. You don't need to be in crisis. You don't need to wait for the right time. You don't even need one of my journals.
Honestly, this is for you, your past, and your future.
You just need a few minutes. A pen. A notepad. Somewhere quiet enough to hear yourself.
The story is already in you. It always has been.
It's just been waiting for you to sit down.
If you'd like a place to start
Your story has been waiting for you.
The Birth Story Reflection Journals are guided spaces designed for exactly this — prompts that walk you through the moments that matter, in the order your brain needs, so the story finally gets the attention it deserves.
Explore The JournalsJade x
Reference
- Pennebaker, J. W., & Evans, J. F. (2014). Expressive Writing: Words That Heal. Idyll Arbor. Decades of research on the cognitive, emotional and physical effects of writing about meaningful experiences.
Jade Marklew
Accredited Mental Health Social Worker specialising in perinatal mental health. 1,000+ clinical sessions with mothers. Through Your Mama Journey, Jade provides evidence-based resources and clinical guidance for mothers processing their birth experience and navigating the long transition of matrescence.
About the author
Jade Marklew
Accredited Mental Health Social Worker specialising in perinatal mental health. Through Your Mama Journey, she provides evidence-based resources and clinical guidance for mothers processing their birth experience.