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EXPRESS YOURSELF
Journaling Is a Good Way to Figure Out Who You Are
It creates a record of your life that’s for you and you alone.
I’ve been keeping notebooks since I was in elementary school, but I became a full-fledged journaler in my senior year of high school. I was taking a class about modernism and postmodernism with my favorite teacher, Mr. Cho, and we were required to maintain notebooks, which we would turn in for a grade at the end of the semester.
As a major teacher’s pet, and a teenager having a great time exploring her budding passion for art and writing, I went hard with my notebook. I didn’t just write my thoughts about The Trial by Franz Kafka, or Civilization and Its Discontents. I chronicled my anxieties about writing, about being a teenager and a girl and a person in this world. I doodled, drew, and made collages.
Even in a situation where I explicitly had to share my notebook with someone else, journaling was a release, a creative way to work out my ideas about the world and my life, to expel my despair and enthusiasm onto a blank piece of paper, raw and unpolished, but also, aesthetically…
