How to start a breakup journal

Seven prompts, below, in order. Tap any of them and Rainku opens with that question already in the composer — rain running, blank page in the middle, an AI on the side that asks one thing at a time.

You don't have to pull yourself together before you open it.

Seven questions for when the page is blank

Pick the one that lands hardest right now. You don't have to answer them all, and you don't have to answer them in order.

1. What's the strongest emotion right now, and where do you feel it in your body?
2. Write a letter to your ex you won't send. Start with: "There was something I never got to tell you…"
3. What do you most want to let go of right now that you haven't let go of yet?
4. In your next relationship, what is now clearly off the list?
5. What's one small thing you did for yourself this past week? (Not replying to your ex counts.)
6. What's one thing you could do for yourself today? Nothing big, just the kind of thing that leaves you a little better off.
7. Write to yourself one month from now: what do you want that version of you to remember?

Tip. One is enough for a night. The rest keep.

Why writing helps in these weeks

• Pulls your head out of the loop for a while. With the rain visuals and rain sound on, the frequency of replaying that conversation in your head drops on its own.
• The things you can't tell friends, you can write down. Friends worry, and friends have opinions of their own. A journal has no audience. Write it down once, then decide what to do with it. What happens to it after is in the privacy policy.
• A few weeks in, you can see where you were. Memory of those weeks goes blurry. Scrolling back to early entries shows you how far this week already moved.
• Slowly the line between "still thinking about my ex" and "what I actually want" gets clearer. Early entries are mostly about your ex. After a while, the entries fill up with things you care about for yourself.

How to set it up so you keep going

1. Open Rainku and pick how you want to start tonight

• Type. Classic writing mode. Cursor on a blank page, every word deletable.
• Speak. Full-screen voice-to-text, pauses don't cut you off. Speaking is faster than typing, especially when emotions show up.
• AI conversation. It asks one question at a time. You just answer. Use this when your head is messy and you don't know where to begin.

2. Decide what tonight is for

• Dump. Get the looping thoughts out. No order required.
• Reflect. Look back at what this relationship taught you.

3. Check your own progress

• Scroll back to early entries. One glance at what you wrote then tells you how far this week already moved.
• Same thought keeps showing up → mark it. You'll know which things still get you stuck.
• Write one monthly check-in. A fixed time to take stock with yourself.

You won't be okay every day in the weeks after a breakup. The journal remembers this stretch, and that's enough.

One last line

Starting a journal in the middle of a breakup doesn't need you to be ready. Rainku opens the first page. What goes on it is yours.

Rainku has entries for other moments too: postpartum, expat life, career pivot. The full set is here.

Read next

Journaling for beginners — five steps and a full first entry, if you've never kept one.

100 journaling prompts — for the days this set is too close to the bone.

A private journal — how your writing is stored and protected.