I may be a little obsessed with journaling. The life-coaching classes I take and the personal growth books I read all get processed through my journal. My daily Scripture readings get processed through my journal. My inner child gets parented through my journal ;).

Writing in a journal is not only for processing, it can also be useful in developing your craft. Writing by hand forces you to slow down and think through how your words are being placed on the page.

You may already know that I think everyone should keep a journal. The purpose of today’s post is to share some thoughts from my own journaling and to maybe get your juices flowing for your own self-growth and writing practice.

📓 Radical Liberty

We millennials seem to be obsessed with freedom. By this I mean that we don’t want anyone to tell us what to do, and we have deep desires to discover our unique purposes in the world.

I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this. I share some of these radical freedom thoughts: I want to be free to be myself; I want to be free to follow passions (instead of people-pleasing); and I want to be free to express creativity.

There has always been something about this that has made me feel icky, though. What if my freedom hurts another person? What if I learn more and realize my choices have not been the best for my family or community? What if my self-indulgence is unhealthy for me?

Radical freedom to do whatever I please can feel almost frivolous or reckless.

📓 Radical Responsibility

I cannot remember where I first heard the idea behind radical responsibility, but my first reaction to it was to cringe. I get tired of people telling me to do more, be more, contribute more, or take on more jobs.

But further reading and reflection showed me it goes deeper than that. Taking radical responsibility for myself, my choices, and my actions may actually look irresponsible to other people.

For example, if I take radical responsibility for my priorities and say ‘no’ to other people in order to say ‘yes’ to my family, those people may feel like I’m not making the right decision simply because they have a hard time hearing ‘no.’

Additionally, If I am following a passion and spend more money than I have to pursue it or try to follow someone else’s step-by-step plan and it doesn’t work, I have to deal with everything involved with those decisions.

I don’t just mean that now I have debt or something like that. I mean it’s my responsibility to understand myself enough to know why I spent more than I should have.

It is my responsibility to understand why another person’s plan didn’t work for me (and to learn enough about myself to find or develop a plan that does work).

It is my responsibility to eliminate the fear that causes me to people-please. To uncover the hurt behind why I try to control others. To discover beliefs I have that aren’t true and replace them with truth. To make big and small decisions in line with my inherent personality instead of what my parents (or whoever) would want me to do.

Radical responsibility actually feels like liberty to me.

📓 How Understanding the Difference Helped Me

Learning about radical responsibility has set me free from the fear of selfishness.

Responsibility means I can still be myself. I can still pursue my passion. But the difference is that I don’t do it at the expense of another person.

This means I don’t ignore how I affect people. If I hurt someone, I can just apologize and move on. If I make a poor decision, I simply learn from it and move on.

Radical responsibility gives me permission to make mistakes and then make it right, to try and learn new things, to shift as needed without having to blame anyone else for my failures.

📓 The Best Part

I think the best part about my radical responsibility journey has been meeting others who have been on the same journey.

It is so lovely to have relationships where the other is not offended when you say ‘no’ (and they can say it to you).

Others who have taken responsibility for their own insecurity, childhood wounds, and unhealthy patterns are truly the best of friends.

This doesn’t mean we are perfect, by any means, but it does mean we don’t expect the other to take responsibility for our messiness. We have the privilege of addressing our own messiness with the support of another person.

And those are the best kinds of relationships to be had.

Have you ever thought about the difference between liberty and responsibility and what this looks like played out in your life?

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🤖 Always written and edited without the use of AI.

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