Writing about oneself is tough for some people, including myself. Where someone may be comfortable writing on any other topic, when it gets personal it can become a challenge. Think about it –you are staring at a blank sheet of paper or screen and wanting to put something down that has never been written before. But once started, it becomes less of a burden.

This is the idea behind List Your Self. It is a journal with prompts that ask you to tell the story of you by listing things about you. Examples of list include “list all the names you’ve been called, endearing and not so” and “list all the things you’d like to say to your mother.” There’s a wide variety of lists under categories like “growing up,” “men and women,” and “greater truths.”

As I went through the book, which I finished recently, I took away a lot from it and its exercises.

It made me think – Where listing my favorite foods as a child poured from my brain like a waterfall, other topics took some mental gymnastics to answer. Whether I forgot about it or tried to put it out of my mind I don’t know, but I did fill out something for each and every page and list prompt.

Some lists were easier than others – Even if what I was going to put down on a list was top of mind, there were times that it was hard to write. I chalk it up to what I said in the opening, as some of these things are being put down in a tangible form for the first time. Nothing salacious or illegal though… as far as you know.

It took a while – I started the book back in 2016 and just finished it now midway through 2020. Where I tried to do one page a day, there were periods – like when I moved – that I had the book packed away and then unearthed it and started back into it. I had a similar experience with the exercises in 1 Page At A Time. Near the end I really just wanted to finish it and did several pages a day.

If you’d like to start chronicling your life, or simply give yourself a daily challenge of a different kind, I highly recommend List Your Self. This book was given to me as a gift, and as it’s full of personal stories of myself I am clearly not passing it along to anyone else! What I am going to do is pass along another journal to another friend, one of a similar genre but more about telling my life as a father… namely as I have another book very similar to it and started back when I first became a father but never came close to finishing it. Needless to say I have restarted this other journal and am taking it one page at a time.

This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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