Messy, Meaningful, Mine

My creative journal, December 2023 - June 2025

A little over five years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert posted a page from her journal on social media, and something nestled deep, deep within me just … clicked. What struck me about her journal was this:

It wasn’t just words. Even though she is a Writer (with a most-capitalized “W”), she’d made art in her journal.

Photo by Elizabeth Gilbert

I’d never known that was an option. Words and art. Words as art.

Her post gave me a beautiful permission slip I hadn’t known I’d needed. I’ve journaled this way ever since. It has brought me such immense joy and opened up my creativity.

I am very much aware that my journals will probably be thrown away when I die. I am spending hours and hours creating something that no one else will ever see. But that’s not why I’m creating it.

It’s messy. It’s meaningful. It’s mine.

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The journal I just finished runs from December 2023 - June 2025. That’s another bit of messiness journaling this way has allowed: I don’t need my journals to fit into tidy calendar-year margins anymore. I start a new one when I need it. I use it until it’s full. Then I start another.

Here are some selections from this edition of my journal. And before you ask/wonder/judge, NO, my journal is NOT just sunshine and rainbows and happy times. It runs the full gamut of emotions. But some things are for my eyes only. Not all art is made to be consumed.

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The very first thing I transferred over into the journal was my 2023 values list that I made with Tiffany Han as part of her Grown-Up Gap Year program. I also stuck this watercolor in there because I had nowhere else to put it. By the way, I don’t watercolor. This was a very happy experiment.

One of the best journaling investments I’ve made is a mini printer that prints out photos on stickers. I am not a photo album person, so this is a perfect way to incorporate images into my journal entries. I snagged the “Maui” and “Aloha Spirit” cutouts from a free magazine at the resort.

I love this one because it’s one of the first times I wrote with white ink on a colored background and incorporated a fold-out feature from a trail map I saved.

Intention setting is an exercise we did as part of Grown-Up Gap Year. I decided to do mine on a photo I’d torn out of a magazine. My favorite magazines to get images and words from are Real Simple and Better Homes and Gardens.

This was another fun Grown-Up Gap Year exercise: a list of things that bring me JOY. :) Also, I love drawing lines to fill in space.

This is when I really started to go crazy with the painted background (acrylic paint) and brightly colored gel pens (my favorite brand is Gelly Roll).

The left-hand side of this entry chronicles our ridiculous plane trip from Baltimore to Charleston, which took us all the way out to Chicago (we had airline miles that were going to expire, don’t blame me for climate change, I’m one tiny childless person!). We could’ve driven there in less time. But it was all worth it to meet SLOTHS!

And here is where I captured my obsession with QVC and shopping in general. I would later realize that I was using shopping as a soothing/numbing mechanism. But I still love QVC. Don’t come at me. I’m an old lady at heart.

I did some experimenting with acrylic paint for my December spread. I was going for some sort of blend; it ended up looking like Dexter sponsored this month. Oh well.

I was scared when “independence” showed up as my word for 2025. I have since accepted it for the kick-ass, life-affirming word it is.

Some pages I made during the Re-Treat Yourself trip in February. I didn’t intend to create a theme in each section; it just happened that way. I love how it came together all on its own; very on theme of the retreat.

Each retreat attendee had a “happy mail” bag so we could leave each other little notes to take home. I made the background with the super-fat Posca markers I ordered from Amazon while I was still at the retreat in California; they were waiting for me when I got home. I love Posca markers.

Thanks to this Instagram account, I learned about vellum paper and junk-journal letter collections. (Also, please comment with your favorite creative/junk-journaling social media people.)

I went very “Mother Earth/eggs as womanhood” in April.

When I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll follow each monthly spread with these daily spaces, so I can write a little something each day. I often miss days. I fill those spaces with art.

Sometimes I miss a lot of days. But that just means a lot of art. :)

Ooh, I had fun with this one. The “sand” is actually a magazine cutout of acrylic paint. I also used some strips of crystal stickers just to give it some (literal) texture, and because it reminded me of how the light bounces off the ocean.

I love how this turned out. I printed out some photos of the ocean from our trip and lined them up perfectly with this magazine cutout. And on the right-hand side, I enjoyed the contrast of putting the little palm-tree stickers along the top of the black-and-white photo.

Oh, my beloved Cora. That’s my peony’s name. We’ve had her for several years and this is the first time she bloomed. She gave us one GLORIOUS blossom. Of course I had to give her some journal space.

And then some more journal space, because Cora is a magical color-changing peony.

These are pages from a recent trip to see my family in North Carolina. I borrowed stickers from my nephews. (They saw me journaling a few years ago, and since then we journal together whenever I visit. We call it our “arts and crafts” time.) The right-hand page is about a black cat who lives across the street from my dad. Whenever I come visit, if he’s outside, he meets me at the end of his driveway and we have a nice snuggle session.

The left-hand side is an exercise we did at the first Tiffany retreat; we wrote this letter to our five-year-old selves, addressing the envelopes and everything, and months later (after we’d all forgotten about them), Tiffany mailed them to us. It was a beautiful experience receiving a letter from myself. The right-hand side is where I stamp out the extra ink when I use my old-fashioned date stamper.

The End. :)