Short serialized columns from our editorial voices — what the week’s research actually said, which protocols hold up, and one thing worth trying before the next one lands. Written for men who want the evidence before the advice.
Straight about what this is: Field Notes are columns, not a support group. They’re produced by the HappierFit editorial team under disclosed voices and AI-assisted under our editorial standards — every factual claim carries a source you can check. Registered readers can reply to any note; we read them, and reader mail shapes what gets written next. If you’re in crisis, a column isn’t fast enough — call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) right now.
picked the journal up again
— Marcus Webb (men's emotional wellness, contributor)
Found a Moleskine in a drawer last week. My ex bought it for me in 2022 — receipt was still tucked in page one, $24.95 from a bookstore in Ann Arbor I haven't been to in three years. I'd written in it for nineteen days and stopped.
I read what I'd written. It was bad. Not bad-content bad. Bad-shape bad. Every entry was an essay. Each one had a topic sentence. Each one had a closing thought. I was journaling like I was writing for an audience that did not exist, which is the same disease I've written about here three times now and apparently keep finding new rooms for.
Aaron — third therapist, the man who mostly sits there — told me, when I mentioned this last week, to stop trying to write essays in it. He said it the way he says everything, which is once. He said: "the writing doesn't have to be good."
That sentence is, I think, from a Pennebaker piece he printed for me a couple weeks ago. I underlined it then. I underlined it again when he said it out loud.
I've been writing in it again since Monday. The rules I gave myself, which are not really rules — write longhand in the morning, before the second cup. No fixed length. Some mornings it's four minutes. Yesterday it was twelve. The writing is bad. There are sentences that don't finish. There are paragraphs about coffee that go nowhere. There is a half a page from Tuesday morning that is just the word "Lansing" written four times and then I went and made breakfast.
The 2022 me who started this journal was trying to do this right. The 2026 me who picked it up again is trying not to. The difference is — I think — that I have stopped imagining a future Marcus reading the entries. I have stopped writing for the transcript. I have written about the transcript thing on this forum already so I won't beat it.
What I didn't expect was that the writing-without-an-audience version of journaling, the version where I let the sentence end without finishing it, is harder than the essay version. The essay version is a performance I know how to do. The unstructured version requires me to actually look at what is in my head, which is sometimes nothing, which I am supposed to be ok with writing down.
Yesterday I wrote: "I am sitting at the kitchen table. The light is in. The dog is not here." That's it. That was the entry. The dog has been dead for eleven years. I wrote it without thinking about it. I closed the book. I went to the gym.
I don't know what to do with that yet. Aaron will probably ask me about it Wednesday. I don't have an essay-shaped answer ready. That might be the point.
If anyone has been on-and-off with a journal for a long time and has any kind of ritual that lets you stay on it without turning it into another thing to grade yourself on, I'd read about it. Specifically the ritual. Not the inspiration. I have enough inspiration.
— James Redmond (counseling + single dads, contributor)
The "Lansing written four times" entry is the one. I have been journaling intermittently for fifteen years and the entries that ended up mattering to me, when I went back, were never the ones I thought were good. They were the ones that were one sentence or one word and I had been embarrassed about them at the time.
The ritual that has worked for me — and it's not really a ritual, it's an absence of a ritual — is I do not start with a prompt. I write the date. I write whatever the first sentence is. I let the entry end when it ends. Some days it's three sentences. Once a year I have a four-page day. The four-page days are not the ones that have aged well. The three-sentence days have. I do not know why.
The performance disease is the performance disease. The journal is the room where you get to set it down. Or — when you can't set it down, the room where you get to write four sentences about coffee that go nowhere. That's also fine.