March 24, 2021

except it's more tactile than a regular journal

if you want to get technical about it.

It's a journal of ideas and feelings and exploring my life in ways that
scare and intimidate me
and make me feel silly.

I started journaling by accident
or maybe I came to it by accident

because I've been futzing around with collage for months now.

I spend hours cutting up magazines, and books, and old copies of National Geographic

and then I spend hours organizing them into binders that are organized by theme:

people and animals
backgrounds and abstracts
food and things
and
words

and lately, when I feel like it

(which is often, which is nice)

I paste those
things and words and
feelings
into an unassuming brown notebook.

But before I paste them I "set the tone" for what I want to explore.

I sit down with a bunch of coloured markers in different 
thicknesses
and do free-form writing until a page or two is full.

Sometimes when the pen hits the paper everything I'm feeling falls out of me onto the page
and it's scary because sometimes I say things I didn't know I was feeling
or didn't want to think about
and I see my words and the weight of them

and I make myself sit when them for a while
before I cover them up.

But I don't cover everything up, at least not all the time.

I find colours and textures and words I've cut out
and layer them over parts of the page
some here
some there
sometimes with smaller pieces of paper
where I've written thoughts out more intentionally.

The journal entries change into
more than words, they become
layers
of feelings

it feels cathartic to tear up pages
make jagged edges
cut up faces and paste them in anew.

It's a place where I can dismantle the world and make it
into something that makes sense.

People keep asking to see it
but that's not what it's for.

It's for me.

And after all these years of making art for other people
putting myself in the spotlight through my art
it feels so
nice
to have a place to explore myself that's

just
for me.