I’ve always found paper to be more forgiving than people. From my first lock-journals at elementary school Book Fairs, to stacks of half-finished notebooks on my bookshelf’s bottom shelf in my childhood bedroom, to the assortment that sit in a neat row on my dorm desk now, I’ve always felt released by the feeling of putting pen to paper and letting my thoughts flow through my ink. Armed with my trusty Pilot G2 black gel pen, my writing makes me feel lighter and more in control of myself and my thoughts.
For Christmas of my junior year of highschool, my mom gifted me a gorgeous leather-bound journal I had found in Barnes and Noble the month earlier. It’s imprinted with my favorite painting, Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, and is 192 lined-pages of creative freedom. My mission with my new journal was to be unrestrained.
My issue with journaling, a.k.a.why I’ve never completed a notebook, is the unnecessary pressure I put on myself for my writing, for my thoughts and the way I articulate them, to be perfect. I want them to be poised, fully-formed, and reflective of ingenuity.
So, for this new journal, I told myself I would just write, unrestrained from ideals of perfection and my writing not being good enough. Inspired by Anne Frank’s diary, where she wrote to an imaginary confidant “Kitty,” I began my entries to “Apollo.”
I didn’t limit myself to just writing in Apollo. My words cascaded in dark ink across pages, but so did spreads of other artsy sides of me. Bolstered by inspiration from Pinterest and TikTok, my journal slowly became less of a journal, and more of a craft manual. I filled its quickly overflowing pages with amateur watercolors, junk journal attempts, scrapbooking elements, and all sorts of cut-outs.
Anything I could glue in, paint, fold, or stamp in had a place in my journal. Postcards of well-loved travel destinations to Canada and the Van Gogh traveling exhibit, novelty sticker packs celebrating important milestones like by 16th birthday, thumb-print trees I would create for my favorite classes in highschool, pressed flowers from a trip to Paris, annual moodboards, cards from my grandma–my journal quickly became an artifact of my life. It wasn’t just my thoughts, but a record of the people, places, and things I loved.
Pretty soon, Apollo became well-known. My friends loved flipping through the crammed pages, admiring the different textures, and how the edges of the pages weathered and buckled from incessant use. The more spreads I created, the more ambitious I got. I remember what should’ve been a simple summer bucket-list took hours to complete, between crafting a moodboard, collaging the photos, watercoloring the accents, and using calligraphy on the items themselves.
Slowly, I started to dread opening my journal, growing exhausted of how each spread became less an opportunity to let out some steam, and more a source of anxiety on how to make each page prettier, more eye-catching, engaging, and refined.
What started as a mode of de-stressing and allowing my thoughts to free-flow turned into exactly what I was hoping to avoid: yet another journal I had placed unsustainable pressure on to be perfect, and more specifically, an unrealistic reflection of my life. Inevitably, I journaled less and less frequently. Instead of five days a week, as I had in the beginning, or whenever I felt like it, journaling became a chore, another task to check off my to-do list. It wasn’t something I got to do anymore, and became something I had to.
I may have stopped journaling, but the thoughts I had always written down didn’t. With nowhere to go, no paper to escape to and close the cover on, my over-active mind’s anxieties and ruminations seeped into every corner of my life. I’ve always believed in the adage of “a problem written down is a problem half-solved,” but I failed to write them down, not wanting to ruin the beauty and novelty of my precious journal with my commonplace writings.
My whole fall quarter of freshman year, filled with more “firsts” and exciting new memories than I could ever hope to count, is summed up in a measly collage of receipts and garbage. It’s not written down, memorialized in any way, or celebrated. What once would have been dozens of gushing pages meticulously going over every exciting interaction and funny occurrence, was reduced to literally a page and a half of basically nothing. Why? Because I was too overwhelmed by guilt of my journal not being perfectly aesthetic enough to use a journal as it’s intended to be used as: a journal!
Over winter break I got a new journal. Same brand, also from Barnes and Noble. This one is yellow with a little gold bee embossed on the front, and honeycomb fore-edges. It’s my writing journal.
I write everything in it. I started a new spread, “What was the best part of your day?”, to reference my favorite table-side tradition from home. It allows me to write a little something, everyday, even just to keep the habit going. All my night-time lore, side quests with friends, random thoughts and inquiries, sporadic efforts at discovering my “deeper self” when I lie awake at 2 a.m. convinced I’m going to change my life. There’s no expectations, just writing. I use the same pen, and my only rule is to use it for everything. This one, when I write, is addressed to “Athena.”
Don’t get me wrong–I still use Apollo for the fun stuff, but more so when I have time. I love poring over my little museum of past exhibits of my life expressed in the ornately decorated pages. Yet, by separating church and state, I’m able to keep enjoying each journal, for their separate purposes. One artsy journal to indulge in and keep pridefully, and one humble one for my writing at its most primal level. I’ve always felt consumed by the need to write everything down, and–for now at least–I can in a mode that feels empowering and gratifying.
So, here’s my ode to journaling: however you start, however ambitious or conservative. Whether you write nightly or once in a blue moon, using pencil or quill, simple or elaborate, just write. Get it all out, on paper, and cement your thoughts in time. Do it for yourself, past, present, and future.