The power of journaling to boost well-being has been proven about a million times over, but the studies bearing out its benefits tend to focus on notebooks that are kept to oneself. Pouring your heart out on the page and then passing it around to strangers isn’t commonly recommended by mental health professionals, but thanks to flight attendant John McKay, we have at least anecdotal evidence of its positive impact.
Since 2023, McKay has brought a lined notebook on his flights for passengers to write in. Its pages are a wonder to flip through — in a variety of handwritings and tones, flyers share advice, chronicle their travels, and excerpt their favorite poems. One young woman expressed her feelings about burying a family member with whom she’d had a complicated relationship. Another gushed for half a page about her impending nuptials.
“I had a kid once on a plane say, ‘Can I just write a joke?’” McKay recounted to Nice News. “And I was like, ‘Of course you can write a joke, whatever you want to,’ so he just wrote a quick little joke. People have drawn pictures in there. There are no rules.”
The 55-year-old got his wings in 2018 after pausing a teaching career to care for his mother following her cancer diagnosis. That led to him launching a foundation for cancer research, which resulted in him flying cross country for fundraisers. Through a series of serendipitous events, he befriended a pilot for Southwest Airlines who proposed that McKay consider coming to work for the company. The job was a great fit.
“I think I just love the unknown. I’ve never been too good for a nine-to-five,” explained McKay, who’s based in Las Vegas. He added: “I have the chance to interact with a lot of people, and it might sound silly, but I do feel like sometimes what I do might make somebody behave a little better in their meeting or feel a little bit better on their way to a funeral or whatever they’re doing on the plane.”
For him, the journal was a natural extension of his desire to brighten people’s days. The idea struck him when he came across a frequent traveler on the internet who’d done something similar.
“Sometimes I’ll make an announcement and let everybody know that I have this thing. Sometimes I just find a few folks that seem to be calling out to me to grab it,” McKay shared, adding, “You can kind of tell sometimes that somebody needs to see something. And I’ve gotten some really amazing responses from it. People have told me that it feels like medicine to them.”
That palliative effect was apparent almost immediately after McKay first started the journal in summer 2023, when he found himself working a flight from Hawaii to the mainland following the devastating fires in Maui. He decided to let everyone on board know about the journal on the off chance they felt like writing.
“Before I could even finish the announcement, a guy in the front row is taking the journal from me. And it passed through the entire plane. So within a week I had all these entries that were really deep and meaningful — people that had just been through something horrible,” McKay said, noting that writing seemed to be cathartic for many of the passengers. “A number of those folks got off the plane and hugged me and said, ‘Thanks so much.’”
Mckay is now on his second journal, the first having been filled and retired. Collectively, the two notebooks have traveled to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Turkey, and other countries across the globe. McKay recently hiked to base camp at Mount Everest in his downtime and took the journal with him, so it now boasts passages in Nepalese. Other languages he’s seen written in it include Polish and Catalan, a language spoken in Spain.
When the powers that be at Southwest got wind of the heartwarming project, they sent a photographer to snap shots of the journal in action and highlighted McKay’s efforts on social media. Since then, he’s seen comments from other flight attendants proclaiming they’re going to start a journal of their own to take on flights. He’s all for it.
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