on journals

a sneaky peeky from your local notebook gremlin heheh *__*

the thing keeping me sane these days are my morning pages. and my bullet journal. and my sketchbook. and my academic scribble book. yes, that’s right, i have four notebooks in rotation. today i wanted to give y’all a glimpse into how each one helps keep me grounded, organized, and inspired.

note: future journal dumps like this will only be available to paid subscribers. if you love what i share in other installments of in the weeds, then these posts will give you a behind-the-scenes view of how i *really* weed through things.

i am an analog girly, and love writing things out by hand. whenever i go home to my childhood bedroom, i find yet more half-used notebooks from when i was kid where i was journaling and drafting ideas for my Next Big Idea for a novel or story. always a mishmash of scribbles, weird shades of blue ink and neon highlighters, and playful dialogue, it has been fun for me to continue exploring adult variations of that theme. the more i write, the more i realize that the physical act of writing feels like a way to remember while also allowing feelings and thoughts to move through me.

BULLET JOURNAL

the big sky blue boy there is my bullet journal, which i’ve been using since the summer of 2022. hoping to finish this specific one by the end of this summer. i haven’t used a traditional planner since high school because bullet journaling provides me with the perfect mix of structure and flexibility. and i normally don’t get too crazy with it, though it varies depending on how much i have going on. but at the most basic: i usually have a monthly overview which includes a vertical calendar layout, a habit tracker, and a list of goals or deadlines i have for the month. i usually color code based on 3 categories: personal, academic, and meetings/events, which means each month gets its own color scheme (usually seasonally themed).

ever since i studied abroad in college, i also occasionally do scrapbook spreads, like this one i made when my friend visited me in paris and came with me to amsterdam for a weekend. i love making them as a way to reflect on the trip, and they help break up the monotony of daily to-do lists that otherwise fill up my journal.

ACADEMIC SCRIBBLES

that brown notebook there is the home for quick notes related to academic work. i have gone back and forth between digital and analog when it comes to writing down quick ideas like literature recommendations, but paper is working for me these days. i bring this with me when i go to consult archival materials as a way to log what i do and what i look at each time, and any initial reactions i have. i also keep it on my desk while i’m reading articles on my computer and want to jot down ideas that come to mind or make a note of citations that catch my eye. eventually this stuff makes it into some digital form. but for me, writing it down on paper first turns it into something “real” and “actionable” further down the line. to protect my intellectual property, this one is for my eyes only :)

MORNING PAGES

i have journaled throughout my entire life. but since the summer of 2020 when i discovered amie mcnee’s instagram, i have been journaling almost every day! it started as a way to help me fill the time and make sense of the instability during the early days of pandemic lockdowns. now it’s an essential part of my mornings! i can’t do anything without doing that first.

last semester, i did julia cameron’s self-guided artist’s way course, and the centerpiece of the course is the morning pages practice. essentially, you roll up to your notebook and produce 3 pages of stream of consciousness prose to clear out the junk in your brain. the hope is that, in making this a daily ritual, you begin to untangle the tired narratives we tell ourselves about who we are, what makes us tick, how we actually feel about that person at work, etc, etc and write new ones in their place. julia also encourages us to use affirmations as part of that work, inviting a more gentle and loving voice into our lives.

at the end of 2023, i was sitting in the SEA-TAC airport journaling, and i wrote to myself about wanting to have my journal be messy, full of doodles and scratch-outs and borderline illegible handwriting. the practice was starting to get a little stale, and i wanted to have little visual avatars of some of my thoughts. (fun fact, the more i doodled during my grad seminars, the more i remembered. even now, i can look back at a doodle of a leaf or string or some swirls and can remember the exact conversation we had that day.) i also got a box of crayola supertip markers from my favorite secondhand art supply store, and i love how they feel on the pages of my dotted Leuchtturm1917. here are some of my favorites from the last six weeks or so:

DOODLES

lastly, the most recent addition is the smaller sky blue guy. i picked him up at an art supply store in the 11th during my first week in Paris. in an effort to be on my phone less, i wanted something that i could throw in my purse to turn to on a long-ish metro ride or sitting in a cafe or while at home in the evenings. it, too, is intended to be a loose space for mess and roughness. the one on the left was done in a dim cocktail bar in the Marais, when i was sipping my mojito and loved the lighting refracting through the glasses on the table. did i look like a dweeb? maybe. but i think it turned out pretty cool (especially for someone who is highkey not a visual artist)!

well weed-ers: i’m still deciding how exactly to format these journal dumps (also, i sort of hate calling them that, so i will gladly take name suggestions). but hopefully this was a fun little tour through my brain this month! another dissertation diary will be coming soon ;) bisous xx