 |
Write your earliest memories. Describe your thoughts, your feelings, the people present and the details of the surroundings. Consider how this experience has impacted your view of the world. Notice if those first experiences have been repeated themselves in similar patterns in your life. |
|
Draw a time line. Insert important events and experiences along the line. If you like, take it into the future, describing what you think will happen. |
|
Draw a graph of the ups and downs in your life. Write about the things that you notice from looking at the graph. |
|
Write about: |
|
your neighborhood |
|
your best friend |
|
your room when you were young |
|
your first day of school |
|
what it was like going to church |
|
games you played by yourself and with your friends |
|
your first crush; your first date; your first serious love |
|
memories that come to mind during the day and how those helped form you; what is significant about them or how they relate to what is going on at the present |
|
Mindmap: start off with an idea or a problem written in the middle of a page and then draw lines off from that word and put down other words that come to mind. |
|
Write down your dreams and your interpretations. If it is a scary dream, give it a happy or funny ending. |
|
Free associate: let your mind wander and write down everything that comes to mind. What do you learn about yourself from looking at the list of words? |
|
Write about your childhood with your nondominant hand. Write a dialogue between the adult you and the child you, using your dominant hand to write for the adult and the nondominant hand to write for the child. |
|
Go to the park and write about what you see (take verbal snapshots). |
|
Think back on a pleasant vivid experience from life. Describe every detail that you can remember: what you could see, what you could hear, what it felt like, the smells and the tastes. Use this detailed description to write a poem. |
|
Write a letter to someone from the present or past in order to take care of some unfinished business. |
|
Make a gratitude list. List all the things that you are grateful for in separate lists according to sight, taste, touch, smell and hearings. Leave room to add to your lists. |
|
Write down old family stories. Note how these have influenced your view of yourself. |
|
Do word portraits of people that you have known. |
|
Write down your fears. Figure out if you can discover where they came from. Decide what you could do to get rid of them. |
|
Write about "labels". How did family and classmates label you? What impact did that have on you? How did you label others? |
|
What peeves you? What angers you the most? What do you hate most intensely? Why? |
|
What grudges do you still hold? How does this affect you? What do you need to forgive? How could you go about doing this? |
|
Do a word portrait of yourself. Be balanced. |
|
Write about losses in your life. How have these helped to form the person you are today? |
|
What was it like to be sick when you were a child? How did family members react to your sickness? Describe an illness that you recall. |
|
Write your own eulogy as you think it would go now. Is that what you would like to have read? If not, then write a preferred eulogy. Specifically, what needs to be done between now and the end of your life to make that a reality? |
|
Make sketches, draw cartoons, do collages in an unlined journal |