Ever since I was a child I was obsessed with Journals and Notebooks.

My favorite thing to do at the start of the School year was ‘paper’ our exercise books (those would be binders and notebooks here for taking notes). I always had intricate designs, mixing and matching color schemes and I was always known for that particular quirk as most didn’t really care.

As I got older and my ability to express my paper became more and more open to other people, I decided that I should get a separate note book for my thoughts and attempts and poetry and prose and random observations. My grandmother, without knowing that she was feeding my habit would never let anything she’d know I like slip by and before I knew it I had more than a half a dozen and I had delegated specific tasks to each one.

At first I was diligent. Prose in one book, poems in one book, thoughts in another with super private thoughts and inner most feelings tucked in between my mattresses but very easily I went back to my random paper scrawling wastefulness and the beautiful books were forgotten.

I’d find the old journals years later and I’d laugh at how stupid I’d been, vow to be better this time and to actually journal to help with venting my thoughts so that I would be less on edge but alas, my habit of inconsistency repeats itself.

I’m in that position again now and I think I realize a lot of the issue. The books themselves gave me the confidence to keep thinking that my thoughts and my writing was worth putting away in a special place and the ability to not keep up with it has to do with my own very high expectation of what a writer is and the freedom that it can truly award someone who uses it correctly.

So. I have a picture of 3 (because I didn’t want to go hunt down the rest) Journals from 2005 to 2007 and no more than 20 pages were used in each.

Instead of buying new books I will press on with the foundations I’ve laid in their infant pages and I hope that this time I will have the courage to be free and confident enough to use it correctly. I’d actually like to Journal not collect Journals.

Wish me luck.