FINDING PERSONAL SOLACE IN JOURNALING

As a teenager, I didn’t have many friends. My anxiety made me cripplingly shy, and I much preferred my own company, surrounded by the art of long-dead painters, the faces of dearly loved musicians, and torn magazine pages, all stuck to my walls with enough Blu- Tack to create a magnificent blue sculpture. Under my bed were piles upon piles of magazines I had collected over the years – from Vogue (in English, French, and Spanish), to NME, to Aesthetica. I found a place of comfort inside the pages – the latest couture, life advice, or album reviews – I didn’t care what was between the pages, as long as I could cut out fascinating pictures and words. After reading the publications, they were ravaged apart with my kitchen scissors on the floor of my tiny bedroom. The floor became a collage of its own, a mess of pens, paint, paper scraps, glitter, gems, and glue, the aftermath of a violent bomb in the centre of my room. The bomb – creating clouds of bright coloured smoke – was set off by my introspective, anxious nature. For I did not have the confidence to express myself through words, yet I needed to pull the contents of my erratic brain into the open expanse of the world. Journal upon journal expanded considerably in size as I filled them with collages, poems, paint, mementos, and ramblings. Whenever I visit my childhood home, I revisit the time capsule that resides under my bed, where over twenty notebooks document my adolescence.

The process of creating these pages, with the intention of my future self being the only audience, gave me a place to develop my tastes and interests, as well as the space to figure out my emotions, as I dealt with a chronic illness (CFS/ME) and severe anxiety and OCD. I remember the first notebook I fully dedicated myself to filling in, after having many unfinished journals as a child. I cut out pictures that I resonated with, dedicated pages to reviewing albums, sharing my favourite song lyrics, and listing the strange dreams I was experiencing. My notebooks became my best friends, a constant and reliable force in my life. I made some friends in school, but I found myself spending more time with my journals and magazine cut outs in solitude. I could be entertained for hours, listening to a Lana del Rey album whilst collaging into the early hours of the morning. As I got older my notebooks filled themselves with concerns for GCSEs, then A-Levels, then moving to university. But I never stopped drawing and sticking, creating a visual reminder of my musical and filmic tastes of the period.

Without my notebooks I think I would have felt lost. School can be really tough when the staff don’t give you enough support, and the students have little in common with you. I felt isolated in my lessons, I couldn’t seem to find anyone that was like me. When I look back, I’m not surprised – my anxiety was so bad, a result of my CFS - that I couldn’t bring myself to talk to many people. But, when you are young, how are you meant to navigate these emotions alone? When I went home and immersed myself in music that I had found after going down YouTube rabbit holes whilst telling my journal exactly how I felt, everything seemed a little more okay. Slowly, I became more confident, which can be mapped through the off-white pages of plain black notebooks. Writing affirmations to myself that I could look back on, surrounded by pastels and dainty decoupage cut-outs of cherubs and flowers, my notebooks were safe-havens for me to essentially therapize myself. Some days all I could do was write incoherent scribbles over my frustrations with myself, other times the pages were prettier, reflecting on what I had scrawled the night before.

I learnt a lot about myself through journaling consistently. I learnt that I loved to write poetry, which can be seen through the passing years, beginning with the documentation of my favourite lyrics, to my eventual copying out of poems that moved me. I also came to appreciate minute details – I would always be on the look out for the most seemingly insignificant section of a magazine to extract for my journal and transform with my handy work and a sprinkling of plastic gems, kept from the free gift ripped from the front of my childhood magazines. Most importantly, it gave me an outlet to indulge in the emotions I was experiencing as a teenager, documenting the hallmarks of my life and the subsequent reactions they elicited in me. The confidence I gained over the years is immeasurable, and I am forever indebted to that mountainous stack of black notebooks.