A safe place to grow.

During one of those low-low cycles, my mom recommended I read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. A friend of hers swore by it. I figured it was worth a shot. Cameron's central practice is morning pages — three pages of longhand free-writing, every morning, before anything else. No editing, no audience, no agenda. Just thoughts moving from your head to the page.

The logic is straightforward: write before the day gets its hands on you, and you start from a more grounded place. You process things before they pile up.

I started doing it digitally — working through half-formed ideas, bad moods, things I didn't know I needed to say. It became the most consistent part of my routine.

Where Was I is the journal I built to support that practice. It's private, it's focused, and it's yours and yours alone — not a blog, not a feed, not somewhere you perform. Just a place to write.

We have a default 750-word daily target that comes directly from Cameron's recommended three pages. It's enough that you can't skate by on a sentence, but not so much that it feels like a chore. Most days, by the time you hit it, you've said something worth keeping.

As I kept writing, I started back in therapy — and eventually began working with a psychiatrist too. What surprised me was how much the journal changed the quality of those sessions. I'd show up with things already processed, patterns I'd noticed, questions I'd been sitting with. The writing had done some of the work before I even walked in the door.

I started thinking about it differently. The journal wasn't just a place to vent — it was part of a larger practice. Therapy, psychiatry, the people in my life who I trusted: these were all part of the same system. Taking care of yourself isn't one easy fix. It's a handful of consistent habits, and support systems, leaning on each other.

The journal sits at the center of that for me. It's there when I need to process something at 6am before anyone else is awake. It's there when I want to prepare for a therapy session, or make sense of one after the fact. It's there on the ordinary days when nothing is wrong and I just want to stay connected to where I am and where I'm going.