I remember my first journal. It was purple with pink stripes for the 2002-2003 school year. My first-grade teacher began each day with a prompt, and I liked opening my journal to a new blank page and using the space to write and draw. Since then, I wrote as a way of self-discovery, building books from erratic musings stretching years. Occasionally, I’d pull out my notebooks and look back at what I wrote, sit with my sister and let her read my past entries aloud, and we’d laugh as she read each page in a different accent.

I didn’t keep a journal in high school, and I regret it. Sometimes I found stray pieces of paper and wrote down my thoughts and stories. I would say that I didn’t have the time, but really, I didn’t want to write my thoughts because I already thought too much. It was stupid because writing had always been my therapy. When we convince ourselves we don’t need something, it is only because we don’t want to admit there is a need for it. Many people don’t remember the day-to-day, the boring things, and those are what really matter.

I began journaling again in college, but instead my notebook took the shape of quotations from books I had read, dreams, and musings from my feelings or observations. One night as I laid down in bed, I heard a guitar playing and began writing as the strings resounded “Beyond the quiet hours of the night, music came softly through the pipes.” As I walked from the library to my dorm, it was raining, and I thought, “She smelled of rain, and he smelled of cigarettes. She was the dew of the early morning, and he was the fire in the storm.” I found that if you see something, really see something, you can write it, and in those moments you remember why you write. You write how you see the world and how it speaks to you. My journal was my book of nonsense, and when I felt uninspired, I’d turn to it and remember where all the nonsense came from and how to capture the beauty within it.