#endearing thoughts

Happy New Year to everyone! Welcome, 2021, we kindly ask you to give us time to catch our breaths and treat us with more kindness than last year. 

I have now started on my new journal and thought it would be fun to share my old ones. The top is the one I’ve just finished, you can see where I began adding a junk-journaling style towards the end that really gave it some bulk. The large notebook on the bottom contains 5 years of my journaling. I have been journaling for over a decade, but that notebook was the longest I’d committed to a single journal. However, as I began learning more through creators on Instagram, I decided it was time for a change! The middle, little booklet is something I whipped up quickly for September to December of 2019. 

It was so refreshing to step away from years of my past self and step into something new and explore who I am now. I believe, in a way, changing journals allowed me to grow and discover who I am, instead of rereading who I had been in the past. In the past I feared change. I feared leaving that large notebook before it was finished. However, to break loose from old shackles and memories felt freeing, I felt as if I could breathe a little easier, and smile a little bigger. I am learning to embrace change instead of fearing it and follow in the steps of those who taught me that allowing myself to start a new journal is just fine. 

A new journal, fresh pages, flat sheets of paper, the smell of the store it came from; the feeling of a new beginning in a new leg of your journey. I often wonder who will read these journals in the future. Years, decades, centuries from now people will be able to pick up and read our stories, decipher our drawings, and smile at our poems. I enjoy the intimate nature that journaling offers yourself, those who you allow to sneak a peak, and those who may one day hold our journeys in their hands and wonder what life was like. 

Some days it is easy to only see what is wrong in the world, but quiet moments such as this where I allow my mind to wander and daydream about endearing scenarios that may or may never come to light, remind me of the beauty and preciousness of who I am, who we are, and of our world.