“What’s this?” I asked my mom when she handed me a fat little pink diary when I was 9 years old. She explained it, and I opened it up to find a magical place inside. Blank pages soon became my favorite escape and still are to this day.

I journaled my way vigorously through high school, spilling all the details about all the boys and all the times they looked at me, and pouring out the ups and downs of my faith journey. I wrote more intensely as a young adult, asking deep questions and exploring my relationship with God even farther. Then came marriage and the wild ride of parenthood. My thoughts and emotions began to pile up inside my soul while my journal collected dust under my bed.

Two Christmases ago, my mother-in-law gave me a beautiful journal from the Gracelaced Shoppe, and I was inspired to begin writing again. Not in that one, of course. The perfectionist in me had to finish the journal I’d been writing in first, which took me a year. And last Christmas, I pulled out the wildflower-covered journal I’d been saving, wrote on my weekly goal list: Journal. I finally began carving out time to journal again and little by little felt my soul unlocking.

My big-picture goals for 2017 were agricultural by nature – Plant, Plow and Seek God. Journaling, I knew, would be a way to pull out the weeds and plow up the soil in my mind that had been uncultivated for so long. I wanted to clear out the junk and make space to breathe again.

So once a week or so, I pulled out my journal and scribbled. I dumped out random thoughts. I wrote out quotes from books I’d been reading. I sketched illustrations of struggles from my heart. I wrote down questions I was wrestling with.

And something began to emerge. I remembered my perfectionism. My need to write things with just the right words. My desire to keep everything uniform. My fear of asking a question and not being able to answer it. My discomfort of starting to journal and being interrupted (and thereby feeling like I couldn’t start a new page without going back and finishing the last, even if I’d been writing it weeks ago). My fear that someone would find what I wrote and judge me for it.

So I let go. And I left pages unfinished. I ignored sketches that didn’t make sense. I revisited my 10-year-old self and told her that even if someone read her nonsense about boys, she wouldn’t be shamed for it and released that fear. I let my baby scribble on the page next to mine. I laughed when I read the trailed off sentences from weeks ago and turned the page to start fresh. And when I reread the questions I’d left unanswered, I realized how God had given me the answers quietly, without fanfare, as I walked on with him.

Writing is such a gift God has given us. To verbalize thoughts we didn’t even know we were thinking. To process through emotions we’ve been afraid to touch. To clear out the mental clutter and open space within us.

And it doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact, it’s better when it’s not.