Why traditional online journaling never hit the spot for me as a Polymath—and how an accidental "monk mode" forced me to build a different kind of archive.

Is there a specific song that you write to, or a few songs that you use just to pull the raw emotion out of you?

Most of us walk through every single day with a mask on, assuming everything in our lives is perfectly OK. But I think deep down, a lot of us are sick of it. From time to time, we catch ourselves wearing that mask. We tell ourselves it’s just temporary. We go home, we read, we watch movies, or we put our headphones on to listen to things that pull the locked emotion out of us. And, of course, we try journaling.

I've always been a highly sensitive person. Because of that, I've spent most of my life filtering how much of myself I give to other people. Not because I don't have good friends or family. I do.

But there are only so many times you can unload the same weight onto the same people before you start feeling guilty about it.

Most of the time I didn't need advice. I already knew what I was supposed to do. I just needed somewhere for the weight to go. Writing became that place. For a long time, I found myself writing raw streams of consciousness on empty Word documents.

I even tried journaling with AI for a bit. It helped a little, even though it felt like cheating when the AI would respond with questions and my once-static writing suddenly turned into a live conversation.

The problem was my habits. I ended up with dozens of loose documents spread across my desktop without a way to remember what I wrote. It was a chaotic filing system. Sometimes I write multiple times a day, so I'd end up with multiple separate text files. I tried keeping one continuous document, but I personally just enjoy opening a completely fresh canvas.

I tried existing online journals, but they never hit the spot. I needed an aesthetic space. I wanted an atmospheric, visual journal with imagery that actively pulled out the buried emotions I didn’t even know I was bottling up.

Around the same time, life quietly pushed me into what I can only describe as an accidental monk mode. No instructions, no manual. I just reached a point where I had so much pent-up, heavy emotion in me that I didn’t know how to get it out. I spent a few intense months semi-isolated, journaling and disappearing down rabbit holes of philosophy, psychology, and different schools of thought. (Jung is a big one)

I read entirely without a goal in mind. It was just rabbit hole after rabbit hole of incredibly interesting, contrasting perspectives on life. Every single week I would experience a completely new, profound thought on existence. It was an intensely heavy experience to navigate, but it taught me how to look at the world from an entirely different angle. I went down a winding road that I thought was leading to absolutely nowhere, but it turned out that road was the actual start of my journey in finding myself—and ultimately, it led to me creating a journal for my own survival.

My monk mode also involved quitting alcohol entirely, isolating myself to strip away distractions, and spending hours writing about how sorry I was for things I had done in the past. But as I went through these intense cycles of introspection, one realization hit me harder than all the others.

If I owed anyone an apology for the sabotage, the neglect, and the excuses, it wasn't another person.

It was myself.

I naturally overthink. When a hundred thoughts are racing through my head at once, it's incredibly easy for me to overreact when the noise becomes overwhelming.

Life has so many hidden crevices that go unexplored because it's terrifying to look into them. It was always easy for me to write about what bothered me on the surface, but almost impossible to dig deep enough to hit the real nerve.

Eventually, I stopped looking for the perfect journal and built my own.

It's called Memorandum Mori.

Six prompts a day. Five levels that gradually become more confronting. A calendar, archive, and a Kintsugi-inspired star that fractures as the journey progresses.

I don't think any of us ever finish the journey. For me, it's just been about peeling away another layer of the onion and seeing what's underneath. Maybe that's all any of us are really trying to do.

If any of this resonates with you, I will drop the direct access links in the very first comment below.