when i finish a journal I label it with a fat tip metallic gold sharpie with the date of the journal’s first and last entry. Then i put it with my other similarly-labeled finished journals on my bookshelf and never read at them again Unless absolutely necessary. Ideally nobody will ever lay eyes on it until my kids/grandkids do after i’m dead and going through my stuff and they read it and think wow grandpa was really fucked up for a long time
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I keep all my journals in a big plastic box under my bed. The Artist’s Way instructs you to read your journals at the end of the course, and it was the first time I’d really done that and now I love occasionally going back a few months or so! You can see patterns, find old ideas or good bits of writing to use somewhere else. At the end of 2023 I read through my entire years worth of journals and did “A Year in Diary Excerpts” on my substack, it was amazing to see the progression throughout the year, and it may as well be an advert for ADHD medication the way it shows how much better it made me!
Jun 6, 2024
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when I was a teenager, I burned all my journals because I didn’t want anyone knowing my thoughts. Or it was just to fit my dramatic emo aesthetic. Either way, I’m sad to not be able to look back on those times. Little me could have used empathetic older me.
I’ve kept all of my journals since. Some of them are really hard to look back on and bring me back to really dark times in my life. I like having them available to me though. I like to imagine my kids or my grandkids reading through them someday and understanding me as a whole human, not just as mother or grandmother.
I tend to write a lot more when I’m sad or depressed, so I’ve been working on writing during the good times too.
Jun 6, 2024
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When I finish a journal, I go to a used bookstore or library and just put it on one of the shelves. It's romantic that someone out there might have my inner thoughts and triumphs and failures all put to page. Bonus points if you wait until you travel and leave the journal in a foreign city
Jan 30, 2024
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“Anti rec:” shut up “Not a rec but…” shut da hell up
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get da fuck outta here
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"In typography, rivers (or rivers of white) are gaps in typesetting which appear to run through a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces."
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