My Journaling Experience

I have been journaling ever since I could write (around four or five years old). Keeping a journal/diary has always been a thing in our family for a long time. We were never forced to do it; we just liked doing it. Most of our journals were just us talking about life, ranting, drawing pictures, and gluing/taping things in that we wanted to keep. It was never like the artistic stuff you'd see on Tumblr or anything. It was very basic. They turned out to be very entertaining after a few years, and it was always fun to read each others journals as well (although it was technically not aloud in our house, we would sneak into each others rooms and read the journals anyways).

I went on a bit of a journaling slump in the past year. I hardly ever wrote, and when I would write, it wouldn't be anything to interesting. It mostly just made me really depressed and so I wouldn't do it.

I also decided that I didn't want to draw or do anything BUT write in my journal, and that made it far less interesting and bland.

However, around the beginning of March, I decided to do at least two pages a day. I've broken that a few times already, yes, but it seems like one day, I'd do, like, half a page, then the next day I'd write eight pages. I have taken down all barriers on drawings and gluing things in, and, with some inspiration from the hilarious WhittyNovels, I am very much enjoying it again.

I have had the same old journal for three years now, and I really want to finish it by April 1st. It's a really nice hardcover one that I got from one of my sisters for Christmas one year. It's black, shiny, and even has a ribbon! At this point, though, it's starting to fall apart. Pages are falling out. The ribbon is just BARELY hanging on... yeah. I also have had another one just waiting for me since September. It's a spiral one, which I haven't had in YEARS, and it's also about the size of three or four standard notebooks put together. My mom got each of us four younger ones that kind of notebook at the start of the school year to use for schoolwork (need I remind you, we're homeschooled. 😒), but I decided to save mine to use as a diary, and I am really excited to use it.

Some people use journaling as therapy, as a creative outlet, or as a way to record their life story. I basically just do it because I love looking back on certain times of my life. I use journaling kind of like time capsules, and I love doing it that way. It's basically every kind of journaling combined. I talk about my life, I rant, I fantasize, I draw, I write down song lyrics and quotes, I glue stuff in that I want to keep, etc. It's really fun when you don't have any rules to keep you down. After all, journaling is supposed to be fun, not a burden. It kind of became a burden when I decided not to do anything but write, and I hated that. I don't really care what it looks like in the end as long as it's fun to look back on. :)