Once, I never thought of myself the journaling type. For the longest time in my life I was hardly a person to be any kind of type drowning in my slurry of then unmedicated or otherwise unaddressed issues. But journaling, an oft obnoxious banner touted as a cure-all among the likes of strict dieting and exercise regimens, was especially unlikely even without considering my sheer number of failed attempts. From emotional Google doc venting dumps to anxious handwritten attempts in journals far too pretty (or expensive) to marr with my scrawl, I had tried it all in bursts too tragically short to count. The longest-lasting of all these attempts came about the first time I was properly medicated for ADHD wherein I became spontaneously hyperfixated on bullet journaling coinciding with a rediscovery of pleasure reading. I’d spent a disgusting amount of money for some pandemic-era student with no income whatsoever on supplies I used so expertly I thought I was neurotypical enough to go off my medication without consulting anyone (note: they were, in fact, not neurotypical enough to cope without medication).

 When my error in judgment was eventually corrected after college graduation, any attempts to get back into bullet journaling were swallowed up by the void of my unemployed non-student schedule and the only flimsy journaling motivation being a need to minimize guilt over past impulse buys. This past competent self with an actual schedule, strict routine, and vague sense of distinction between the days thriving in the semester structure constantly haunted my MMO-addled summer self. It was only at the end of this wasted summer that I realized the true severity of my condition not just over that ghostly summer, but throughout my entire life up to that point. I did not feel like a real person. Memories were slippery things with very few defining features almost impossible to place on a timeline. Unless imposed directly on me by a frightening external structure, I was bereft of any ambition, desire, or history. I was a joke of a ghost, easily drained to the dregs by my first full time job.

 However, it was at this job where I found actual justification to take up a more functional form of bullet journaling to deal with the stress of an office in complete disarray. I bullet journaled with some regularity about largely work-related things as I had no life of my own choosing outside of those office walls. The thought of beginning some kind of personal journaling practice began to tug at me more and more, too-conscious of my unused supplies and dangling years-long want to tap back into the creativity I stomped out for lack of ability to concentrate on sustained improvement efforts or the influence of that demoralizing image of the starving artist. The impetus I needed to start again would come in the unexpected form of an ill-advised purchase of a game I already owned telling the story of a cat girl who, on paper at least, was more of a mess than I was and her whimsical doodle journaling.

 Night in the Woods is a 2017 story-focused game already living in the forefront of my mind ever since my first full playthrough during a lonely, un-seasonal time where it managed to plant roots as an inspiration to dabble in graphic design eventually leading to my registering for courses taking advantage of a temporary free tuition deal. Despite this slow-burning dalliance with design I’d been cultivating, indulging the creative side of art and actual illustration had yet to emerge as something viable in my mind. My last several attempts to try to stick to a drawing routine and capture the ideas swirling in my head were isolated only to times of getting really into OCs with my roleplaying friends. I had originally re-entered this game after making the sadness-inspired re-purchase of the game off Steam on Halloween night with the intention of getting to play through Gregg’s ‘route’ and experience the game at a more seasonally appropriate time. Little did I know, the facet of the game I would fixate on above all else to the point that I didn’t even end up finishing the playthrough was the doodle entries in Mae’s therapist-mandated journal. I was nothing short of delighted to see these simplistic, charming little captures of events in her life. My fondness further echoed what I felt for Max’s journals in Life Is Strange, a personal foundational game at a past time of creative struggle. Not too long after I started a ritual of playing through a day of the game after work each day, I bought a fresh full-priced sketchbook from the craft store hoping that twisted little pang of spending guilt would obligate me to actually try with some consistency to keep up even a sloppy account of my days in the form of whatever doodle I could produce, as long as it was authentic to whatever I was in the moment of my depiction. My first entry was made on 10 November 2021, a coincidental beginning of the end of my sketchy employment, and I have made an art journal entry with some kind of illustration every single day since without fail.

 Initially, my entries consisted exclusively of rough doodles. Most were intentionally designed to look terrible for fear of expending actual effort to test where the limits of my skill lie would frighten me away from the practice too early in habit formation. I would slowly manage to stomp down this fear over the first few weeks of journaling on the regular and begin to branch out to use more of my old art supplies and stationery, even going so far as to dig up even older supplies buried in storage from when I once dreamed of attending art school in the distant future. Pivotal in this process, though I cannot pinpoint the exact date of when I came across this video essay, was the unexpected “The Dialectics of Rick and Morty” video by the chaotic CJ the X which so effectively captured the poisonous impulse of perfectionism and how it holds you back from creating enough to improve your skills alongside your tastes completely at odds with the ugly art you create with that same beginner’s skill. No other singular piece of media or advice existed in my life that I could credit more with giving me the courage to keep carrying on and revel in the simple act of creation, or even specifically creating bad art for bad art’s sake. While I was months away from starting to make anything classifiable as even “bad art” producing nothing more than noncommittal doodles with notes about my day, I was able to more easily detach from my inner critic and treat my journals as more of an artifact of a time in my life or an extension of a past self I can revisit more reliably than any memory.

  I had kept up the art journaling habit for a time as the first non-work consistent structure in my life, I began another more detailed text-based journaling practice I have also kept up to this day of writing an account of the days events digitally through Notion which has in its own right drastically transformed my memory and productivity alike in a way that I could write an entire separate article for. Most relevant, for the purposes of art journaling, was that this practice freed me from the obligation to make my art journal entries accurately capture my entire day and instead focus on depicting things outside the scope of what I actually did on that day, thus inviting more experimentation. I started to dabble with mixed media - pasting in scraps of construction paper and using my now much beloved washi tape for headers and designated spaces to date my entries much like how I would decorate old bullet journals. Experimentation uncovered a muted want of things I could spend my paycheck on that would actually make the work I endured to earn it feel worth it because I actually had use of these things. I began making regular recreational trips to craft and stationery stores to buy all kinds of different pens which only later I’d realize had a lot to do with the sensory experience of drawing with different materials as a sorely needed form of stimming. I was using the things I was purchasing at a great consistency and finally deriving enough joy from them that I no longer felt guilty or the phantom weight of opportunity cost over having spent money for one of the first few times in my life.

 As journaling blossomed into a fully-fledged special interest of mine, I was better able to identify my own emotions that too long eluded me even through observations as silly as noticing I was drawing myself crying or in abstract agony far more often than I should. I was able to realize the true toll that my work was having on me to the point that when I finally had a break after catching the plague that enough was enough and I had to remove myself from the situation before things got any worse and I employed a more familiar cowards method of quitting by refusing to show up when I physically couldn’t stand it anymore. By that time a new semester had started, the first in my graphic design program, and I could face it as a more tangible person having stood up for themself over what they truly needed in life.

 However, at the time, I still didn’t view my life as much as one. Not one with any feasible future at least. Merely a more generous view of a path just ahead that I would fail to live much past. Pandemic-sustained burnout was still in no shape to properly heal and would still not be for some time as it was layered on top of an even more deeply internalized assumption from my adolescence that I couldn’t have possibly lived as long as I had already as I was so unfit to exist outside the educational path I slid into with little resistance. While art journaling unlocked a sustainable source of drive and motivation to make my days distinct so I could document them for my future, hopefully better self for however long they would exist, my sense of what I even hoped these events would be were murky at best and so shakily defined by the few people around me instead of by my own desires. Yet I still had the ever-frightening luxury of time and a tool to help me move from one moment to the next while keeping some scrap of sanity as I started the grueling process of really trying to figure it all out, to make the meaningful strides that my mental health treatment already in place could not make for me.

 So I kept journaling. I kept up with my same art journal expanding and shrinking the standard size of my entries as I saw fit (one such notable shrinking being hilariously the exact day Elden Ring was released when I went from full page entries to half page entries with some pretty thick washi tape headers to save on time). In April, I added a new daily doodle-focused form of art journaling to use as a warm-up after finding inspiration for doodling in each square of a calendar planner in an article posted by my favorite stationery site. I continued to experiment with newer forms of occasional journals designed around specific purposes and revisited old sketchbooks with the intent of experimentally filling the pages whenever I saw fit or curating a book to carry with me for half-sketchbook entries and half-preemptive art journaling to capture a moment I was already in. So much of my spare time when not journaling was consumed with thoughts of journaling, of art supplies and what I could possibly do with them. Even so, I still didn’t consider myself an artist. Nor did I consider myself an aspirational one. It failed to even click with me that I was technically taking a form of art classes until a friend joked about something justifying putting me through art school and I was halfway through my first ever college-level art course where I was tasked with actually trying to learn the fundamentals for the first time. I can’t recall if there was an exact moment where it truly slotted into place that I wanted to make art. Perhaps there was a specific one that I was only too shy to admit even in my journals until a later landmark event. But I know that moment came about some hour spent inhaling charcoal-dust in the studio trying to perfectly capture some angle or shadow of a still life where I realized just how much I enjoyed this different way of seeing the physical world required for drawing it. How much I reveled in this slower consideration of things successfully commanding the rapid-fire slick chaos of my thoughts mired in a body that so rigidly demands structure. I felt, for some moment, that I had truly found a bridge. Not one yet fully rendered in detail that I could yet cross, but one that I could sculpt in due time.

 In the way of all my desires for anything, whether for people or things, the true depths of my wanting were only clear to me when I was apart from them. The exhilaration of finishing that course through all my careful study was unmatched and the weeks of my semester break and of that following semester were hollow by comparison. Cast in a constant desire to go back to the studio and force myself to work in painful bliss. It was only when I finished my first volume of my art journal on 3 October 2022 in the meat of the semester did I feel anything akin to that level of satisfaction and finally allowed myself to admit that I wanted to be an artist. Not necessarily as a career, but I wanted to make art. That to make art for art’s sake in any form which that art might manifest was what made me feel like a real human person. This was how I began my second volume of art journaling putting in, for the first time, a genuine effort to independently study art in my own way as much as I possibly could eventually leading to my abandonment of my graphic design program to focus more on art and spend that precious last semester taking art courses.

 The path was not easy from then on, but it was comprehensible. I had a goal in the forefront of my heart I could attend closely even if it came with the baggage of not slotting into other pressing worries of career ambitions and life goals. No matter how often the idea of quitting crossed my mind because it would never lead to a career I’d want or how slowly I was improving because of physical limitations or how far behind I was on this entire journey having ‘wasted’ so much of my life so far doing nothing, I still kept carrying on for the sake of making more journal entries. To work, if not for the me of the present, for the me of the future who would be even more unendingly grateful for all that I endured than I currently feel for what my own past selves endured in search of all the present marvels that finally make me feel so happy to be alive.

 Because I kept living, kept journaling, I experienced a feeling that eclipsed the satisfaction of completing my first drawing class by completing my second with a painting that I invested the longest amount of my time and attention I had ever invested in any singular work that I was proud to show off as the fruit of my labor despite its technical flaws. Technical flaws which, even better, I delighted in because it meant that I had clearer direction in how I can learn from the piece and improve even more. The massive climb of improvement ahead of me and all the time of my life in and out of memory not spent on the effort of scaling it was no longer a source of despair, but a font of delight on par with the delight I feel in knowing that there is always more to learn or more books out there to read or the simpler fact that I have not yet encountered everything I will ever love. As of the time of writing, I am on the final day of volume 4 of my art journal and will begin setting up for volume 5. A volume that will accompany me as I inevitably encounter unexpected new things to love I will capture within those pages.