Every year, when the time comes to make a Christmas list, the first thing I write down on my list is a new journal. This has been my routine for the last couple of years and having a journal has become a significant part of my life. Owning a journal creates a special place where a bunch of memories and thoughts that I have throughout the year are all compiled together. It helps me cope with various events and allows me to have a safe space where I know parts of my life are kept sacred.
I especially like getting a brand new journal every year because it feels like a restart. With each new journal comes new memories, feelings, and energies. Getting a new journal annually allows me to separate the years of my life and treat them all individually with the same amount of pages to fill. I feel like with every new journal comes a new version of me and a new attitude about how the year will be. With a new journal, I feel like I can push events of the previous year aside and keep the years as their own entities.
Having a new journal every year also lets me see how much I have grown. I love going back and reading the things I wrote in my journals over different years. Being able to look back at the different types of things I wrote about really reminds me of how much I have grown over the years. I like rereading the things that I was angry about or worried about and having the hindsight of knowing how those situations worked out. Also, having a specific journal for each year shows how different I become every year. Looking at old journals makes me feel like I’m reading a stranger’s journal because of how much I have changed. Each journal is like a little time capsule of how a year went for me. Another fun part about going back and reading my old journals is seeing what stuff I was writing about continuously. It’s so interesting to see what I was obsessing over in previous years compared to now.
To sum it up, I love getting a new journal every year because it allows for each year to have its own special space. I also love having this space to just brain dump as often as I want without worrying about running out of pages. Getting a new journal every year also lets me see the different phases of my life. I want each journal to be its own defining moment.