Shut Up Kristyn! | Misc

63 | my journal spreads

Hello friends! Today I wanted to share some of my favorite journal spreads I've made as well as how I journal. I'm an avid collector of notebooks and love having separate ones for specific things that my brain wants me to write down. As I've mentioned before, I'm the kind of person who likes their things categorized and everything in one category will go in the same place.

I'll start with my journey and how it began:

I first truly got into keeping a diary-type journal when I was in the 4th grade. I had this journal with the ugliest, largest, pink, light pink, green, and brown polka dots (honestly why was that color scheme so popular in the 2000s???) and the edges of each page were framed in green as well. That thing was my LIFELINE. I wrote in it all the time and there are actually some pretty hilarious stories from my school days in there.

After this, I kept getting new diaries every time I ran out of space. Sometimes they were more heavy-duty, sometimes they were actual spiral-bound notebooks that I scribbled "I ❤️ Niall Horan" in on like every page. Lmfao. They're a TRIP to look back on. Especially because being random was peak comedy back then so I'd be writing about my day and then randomly go "oh em gee... I LUV TACOZ!!! UNICORNS ARE SO FLUFFEH XD"

MOVING ON QUICKLY FROM THAT—

To this day, I still keep a "life updates" journal with entries about events that happen as well as records of how my mental health is doing at the time. I don't write as often as I used to (I'm lucky if I do it twice a month) but keeping journals like that has become such an integral part of me over the past 12 years since I've started that I really don't know who I would be if I stopped.

The second kind of journal I keep is a dream journal. I remember my dreams almost every night and they are VIVID. Since I'm fortunate enough (or unfortunate enough...) to have this quality about myself, I wanted to keep track of them. This helps me determine common themes and keep track of how weird my dreams get if I miss my meds. Also, unfortunately, PTSD gives me ✨trauma dreams✨ and ✨trauma nightmares✨ so I keep records of those for my therapist in case I notice them getting particularly bad, unsettling, or frequent again. (Anyone who has suffered from trauma dreams/nightmares can assert that they can be deeply unsettling and overall not fun.)

I have multicolored tabs to mark nightmares, trauma dreams, missed meds, lucid dreams, etc. Luckily, most of my dreams are just like "I was in a sunflower field with Danny Devito" or dreams about Spider-Man.

Before I get into the third type of journaling I'm currently doing, I want to backtrack and explain my bullet journaling days.

Back in 11th-12th grade, I was SUPER into bullet journaling. If you don't know what that is, you can look up pictures, but it's basically an agenda you design yourself for each month/day/week and you can also keep track of other stuff in there. Most bujos (as they're called for short) that are popular on the internet are typically very clean and have a lot of white space. That's certainly the vibe I was going for at first when I did these.

Then I hit my university days and I did not have the time to keep creating spreads all the time. It's fun but very time-consuming.

In late 2020 I decided that I missed some of the aspects of a bullet journal and didn't want them to mix in with my diary-type one, so I created what I call my ✨Chaos Journal✨.

My chaos journal is exactly what the name implies. It's pure chaos. You'll flip a page and have no idea what you'll find. Instead of the clean-cut aesthetic that most bullet journals have, I don't worry about making mistakes and cry because a line I drew isn't straight. I do whatever the heck I want in it.

I have monthly favorites, random art, collages from my trips, outtakes from my Polaroid camera, bucketlists, packing lists, and a bunch of other really random things. It's more scrapbook-y than a regular bullet journal since I use a huge variety of materials and still has journalistic aspects. I couldn't think of a better name for it, so the chaos journal title has just stuck.