journaling

I spent part of the year in Denver, helping my parents pack up my childhood home. There were many boxes from my childhood and college years that were taking up space in my parents’ garage - the number of journals from every stage of my life was staggering. I’ve always been a night owl, and I’ve never been a very accomplished sleeper, so I have many memories of nights spent in my room, waiting for sleep with headphones on and a pen racing across a page. I’ve ruined more than one pajama top with a pen breaking under my weight in my sleep. I remember writing in my journals daily, with a slightly complex system - one journal was for my feelings, one was for poems, one was for prayer. One was more of a shallow “I’m bored” journal. Sometimes journals changed roles.

The result of this is that most of my young life is recorded, but not in an organized fashion. The same journal that holds my hopes and dreams at age 12 might also contain poetry from when I was 15 or an anxious scrawl from when I was 20. When I think of myself at any age, I imagine myself writing in a journal. I even took senior pictures where I staged lying on my belly, writing in a favorite journal. About halfway through my college experience, I really began to struggle with my mental health and one of the first things to go was a regular journaling habit.

In the nearly 10 years since that time, journaling has been something I am always trying to do, but rarely actually doing. I sometimes look back on this and worry that I’ve lost years and years of time, almost all of my twenties, that I’ve let my future self down somehow. I mean, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted to do is write - what does it mean if I reach the end of a day and I can’t think of anything to record? If I lay on my bed, still awake in the middle of the night, with a pen hovering over a blank page? Who am I, then?

Earlier this year, I opened a gorgeous notebook I had been carrying with me everywhere since 2021, but rarely writing in. I wrote down the date, the time, my location. I was full of emotions I couldn’t name. It was early in the evening, I was wide awake, and my cat Spooky was lounging next to me. I held my pen, poised to write, and nothing came. I felt tears of frustration welling up as I scrawled “I don’t have anything to say,” and slammed the notebook shut. In the past, on nights like this, I would beat myself up and spiral, anxious about why I can’t express my emotions to anyone, not even myself. I would think about how boring I must be, how wrong I was to think of myself as a creative and a writer, etcetera. But this time, I stopped the spiral before it even began. I decided to be a little more practical - I knew I wanted to start journaling again. I also knew that I was rusty.

I decided to humble myself and ask the internet. I hopped on to youtube and searched “how to journal”, scrolling until I found a thumbnail that appealed aesthetically and a description that made no mention of productivity. I found a video called “how I use my notebooks” by the artist Megan Rhiannon and I felt energized in a way that I haven’t in a long time.

Megan is a self-employed illustrator who uses a combination of traditional day-to-day brain dump style journaling, keeping a commonplace book, and decorating with stickers and ephemera as both a creative outlet and a way to cope with various effects of her autism. Since she struggles with memory loss, she uses a planner to record her day-to-day activities and important memories after they’ve happened. In her commonplace book, she copies down articles and quotes she wants to remember. She also writes extensively on topics she is hyper-fixating on or knows won’t interest anyone but herself as an outlet. She’s open about gluing decorations on or folding over pages that she doesn’t like the look of or that contain things she’d rather not see again. I realized, watching the free and various ways she uses her journal, that I had been so blocked because I had too many rules and expectations for myself.

To me, my journal was only for me to record the events and emotions I was feeling, a place for my brilliant observations about the world around me. I was trying to be cool so that I might like myself more. Can you imagine a more profound waste of time and energy? I adopted a similar system to Megan’s and have been journaling nearly every day since. I honor my brain by writing down the things that I think about and bring me joy, even if it is just waxing poetic about a new album or book or show that I like. I honor my heart by writing out my rage and sadness over things I would have dismissed as too frivolous before. I decorate the ugly feelings and cringe-worthy expressions of enthusiasm with stickers and collage and keepsakes, and most importantly, if I come across a piece of negative self talk or a painful memory that does not and will not serve me, I cover it up with something beautiful or silly.

It is my job to take care of myself. It is not my job to be an archivist or a historian of my own pain. So, I sit down for awhile a few times a week, if not every day, and I take care of myself. Sometimes it’s pretty, sometimes it’s chaos, mostly it’s something in between. But this is what it looks like.

my commonplace (L) and planner (R) during a typical week, with stickers to decorate and carefully placed ephemera to protect the innocent.