happy birthday, journaling
Yesterday, my sister Ashtyn texted me a photo from the day before my ninth birthday. I was sitting in my parents’ bed, smiling at the camera as I cut a bite of my mom’s world-famous chocolate-chip pancakes. My breakfast-in-bed tray (a baking sheet) included my plate and a sippy cup of milk.
“Not the sippy cup at 9 years old,” Ashtyn teased.
“I could not be trusted with breakfast in bed,” I replied.
“Not when it ain’t even your bed,” she said.
All of my mom’s digital photos are in an Amazon Photos account that many of my family members are, frankly, obsessed with. It started during the pandemic, when all six of us were living at home. When the TV went to sleep, it would scroll through our photo collection—something that interested us nearly as much as the Stranger Things episodes we were binging.
Most of my family, immediate and beyond, are takers and keepers of photographs. Not professionally—just to preserve the memories. I, in particular, am also obsessed with dates, tracking anniversaries of everything from my Pop’s death (five years ago on Friday, and I still miss him every day) to the day I adopted my sweet kitten Bowman (four years ago tomorrow, and I miss him every day, too).
So I look at Amazon Photos’ “On This Day” feature nearly every day, which is how Ashtyn and I were looking at photos of my past birthday celebrations yesterday. I looked at the ninth birthday eve photo again and noticed, just at the edge of the frame, an open journal and pen. I recognized the journal as the pink polka-dotted spiral journal my mom gifted to me earlier that year, before I went on my big girl trip to visit Gram and Pop in Florida.
When I was younger, I often wrote in a journal (one, I remember, I named Annabelle) for a few days, then lost interest or lost it. That pink spiral journal is the closest I got to filling one, and I do still have it.
It was on my 13th birthday, when my friend Megan gifted me another pink journal, that I magically became committed to journaling. I’m still not sure what clicked with that journal and that birthday, but I have consecutively kept a journal ever since. I’m currently a few pages from the end of journal #75, a yellow journal with unlined pages that is about to burst at the seams from the tour maps, coffee sleeves and other things that most would consider trash that I have taped into it.
People often ask me how I remain dedicated to keeping a journal. The last 18 months or so have been a particular challenge. I was busier at work and was spending more time with friends and in a new relationship with the man who would eventually become my husband, and I fell drastically behind on journaling. At the beginning of 2024, I had 140 days that I still needed to write about. When my mom asked about New Year’s resolutions, I said, “Catch up on journaling, though I don’t know if fully catching up is realistic.”
Largely thanks to a new, less stressful job and a husband who makes it his life mission to not let me wash a dish or an item of clothing, I fully caught up in October. I felt a huge sense of accomplishment, and it helped journaling seem less like a chore and more like what it is—one of the great loves of my life.
Today is my 26th birthday. It’s been 13 years since I started keeping a journal at 13, which means it’s been a vital part of my life for half my life. (Remember how I said I love to keep track of dates?) I don’t know who I’d be today without my journals and the practice of journaling.
Thanks to an impromptu trip to Jacksonville last weekend, I’m currently about eight days behind; maybe I’ll work on that today. So many of my journals—dating all the way back to that pink polka-dotted one—include trips to Florida.
After I noticed my journal in the throwback photo, I pointed it out to Ashtyn and quoted an Olivia Rodrigo song: “I am the girl I’ve always been.”