When I was around 12 years old, I often wrote about my daily experiences on my old beat-up laptop in the most disgusting font I have ever seen (Papyrus) and in font size 13 (to be “quirky”). I would write on and on about classmates I hated, teachers that were rude, and most crucially, about P.E. classes, the bane of any middle schooler. Back then, it was my 50-page Microsoft Word document and me against the world, and I never felt freer than when I would run home, curl up in my bed, and dump everything into my laptop keyboard.
But when I entered high school, I left journaling behind and my Word document collected dust when I started using Google Docs instead.
It was not until my freshman year of college that I found that old journal again and opened it up like a time capsule. I should have been embarrassed, sure, but instead, I admired my dedication to documenting everything that happened all those years ago. In high school, everything was a blur and journaling felt like a waste of time. In my first year of college, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I could barely remember what I even ate for breakfast. It was at that moment when journaling became appealing to me again, as I became concerned about my lack of concern towards the passage of time when everything was uncertain and the world seemed to be falling apart.
I really did try to journal again. I tried to open up a document on my laptop, both from Word and Google, but keeping up with it became a chore as the next day came without any warning. I got an app on my phone with journaling functions and promised myself to at least jot down a single thing that happened each day, but that failed to work as well. Eventually, I gave up and before I even realized it, I had become a sophomore and schools started to open again. I entered The Hill one foggy morning and while I was perusing the materials, a shiny, elegant, and strange journal caught my attention. Without even realizing it, it was in my backpack with the receipt sticking out from inside. I was ecstatic to fill it out, using the little stationery I owned to decorate each page. In all honesty, nothing exciting really ever happened, but I was more excited about the decorating aspect rather than writing, which helped me keep up with each day. I would doodle characters from whatever TV show I liked that day and color it in with highlighters. Sometimes I used a pen, sometimes a pencil, and sometimes I even wrote in marker. Unlike other more aesthetic journals, I didn’t try to be consistent, rather I just did whatever I felt like that day, to really capture how I felt at that specific moment. I did however have a segment in each entry where I put the “Song of the Day” (SOTD for short), which would be the song that I listened to the most that day.
I wouldn’t say that the joy I felt was similar to my middle school days, but it was a joy I haven’t felt for a very long time. Every day is important, no matter if nothing special happens, and I want to make sure that I don’t let time get away from me, at least not until I write something down in my journal.