Dress: Modcloth.
Sweater: My grandmother's.
Tights: Target.
Hair Bow: Forever21.
Loafers: c/o Pink and Pepper.
Lipstick in MAC's 'Rebel.
What if you had the chance to look back on any day of your life and relive what you felt, thought, saw? It's be like you were almost at that moment again, like it never left. It's impossible, isn't it? To go back to a time we wish we could remember more accurate, perhaps feel that happiness one more time.
But all of that is possible. You just have to journal.
I've written in a journal every night before I fall asleep for nearly two years now. I started on New Year's of 2012 and haven't missed a single day since. I read an article online the other day on why it's important to journal and it hit home with me because all of the reasons were why I myself journal. Some were things I didn't even realize but when pointed out, I saw how true it was for why I make my half-asleep self groggily write about anything that comes to my mind on the blank lines of a $6 journal I bought from Target.
I want to remember life in vivid detail. Not just day to day, but journaling is a depiction of life. It takes the journey we go through in all of its entirety. A lot of days I have nothing special to write about. It's I sat in my dorm, I did my homework, and I wasted far too much time on the computer. But other days are profound. The smallest moment that changes my way of thinking, a monumental decision that alters my life course. These small to large details of my every day life give an accurate depiction that I would other wise forget. All of my years would just blend into each other and become this messy entanglement of blurriness. There wouldn't be these defined days with specific feelings that I can never go back to and feel again.
Think about that. What I write about today will not be what I write about tomorrow. In the sense that by tomorrow I'm a completely different person already. I've seen things and heard things and felt things that I didn't the day before and it totally alters me and what I could/am writing about. Incredible. But with journaling, I freeze that moment in time with who I was that day with all of the little details that go unnoticed that shape us every day.
I just cannot express enough how much journaling has changed my life. I look forward to journaling until the day I die. It is this beautiful, small portion of my day I look forward to anxiously. That blank page with lines and my crappy pen that's always half out of ink. I want to read these journals again and again and again throughout my life and relive the girl I was and see how I get to the girl that I am. I want to pass these journals down to whoever I believe will appreciate them, so that they can read who I was and that maybe it will help them figure out a little bit of who they are, too.
Just journal. It doesn't have to be long. It doesn't have to be deep,. It doesn't even have to make sense. Just do it. You'll thank yourself later.
With much love, Lauren.
