Junk Journals: Crafting My Way to Solace

JUNK JOURNALS: Crafting My Way to Solace

Also During COVID-19

"Come-ON, you have two! I'll trade ya all these scratch and sniffs if you'll just part with that Hello Kitty one. You're not even using it. You are my best friend, pretty please?"

Yeah, I swindled my very first journal off of the girl next door. I utilized Peer Pressure. We were about five years old...

My beautiful long personal tradition of journaling began before I ever attended school. In my first one, that blue Hello Kitty design from that corner shoppe at the local mall which I had let my friend know I coveted, I learned little, namely that purple flair pens bled through the thin little pages too much for my budding aesthetic senses. It grew to contain documentation, a simple "I am here" to the world, filled with observations such as what I ate for dinner eat day and whether or not, most often, not, made my bed that day. These were my five year old thoughts and concerns. That alone is beautiful to me- that no one had made me feel like I was not important yet, that I did not question at my writing onset any of the menial issues which plague me as an adult such as who will read/care, or do I have a right to claim the space of calling myself a writer. Life was good and filled with scratch and sniff snickers. When I had filled the Hello Kitty, it was on to a one with prompts from Laura Ingalls Wilder where I found larger insights and another fiesty little girl with brown braids down her back, a girl who was much like the me I was in the process of becoming:

In the Future I Hope My Work Will Be... ["To teach little kids to sing songs. or to feed people who can't get money to get food for them-selfs. (sic)"]

My journals have been my reprieve, my own sounding board, my secret world created by my own ideas and ideals, my confidantes. My Junk Journals created during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-2021 have been so much more. At one point during essential working and otherwise total isolation in my home, I navigated staunchly through another episode of great depression. My largest junk journal from that time is very dark as people were dying at my job and on the streets

and the whole world was thrown into the perils of an unknown virus running rampant. Within that obvious historical socio-cultural context, my journal also allowed me to just be me, one prone to depression anyway and yes, well, gripe about my admittedly petty personal yet very real to me utmost grief and loss of Hope. I had no where else to turn. My junk journal did not beat me down or shame me for being so self-centered at a time like this. It's pages, which I created through gluing recycled scraps of paper and flat found objects to quotes or my bits of writing, or song lyrics, at times were all that I could even do in a day's time. It was my darkest hour type depression, of which I am most familiar, yet it hits me and attempts to wipe out my whole world every time. Glue, snip, cut and paste, wallow and design- Junk Journaling is what kept me alive this time.

When I did try to reach out to a cousin by phone she lovingly suggested "maybe some lighter reading right now."

But, my Junk Journal did not complain about Nietzche, de Beauvoir, 9()'s Nine Inch Nails, nor the like. It accepted all of me, absorbing my blood and tears right into her pages. Most the time I could barely write. I just kept swimming, or cutting scraps of paper into little squares with intention to write or mentally process more when I could. I was off the deep end of knowing there was nothing in life that was not temporary, that there is indeed no inherent meaning neither in our labels, roles, nor our actions. Outside, people had fear of dying as The Virus was attacking autoimmune systems of the poor and medically compromised and disenfranchised dis-proportionally, but honestly alone in my home I feared only for those few who have historically been the only ones there for me in full crisis mode- my (aging) parents and siblings. I believe a lot of people went through something similar, in the face of The Virus, a case of the look out for your own first even though it sounds ugly to discuss out loud, but my Junk Journal (which I actually had begun in 2019,) did not critique me. She willingly absorbed my paint, my personal pains instead.

Centerfold to Junk Journal: Le Comment

It becomes about "the how" in life, how to live past the point of hope and past the point even of despair. When there is nothing at all, when the lights feel permanently low, when the will to live has sucked out of out lives, but (alas,) are bodies are still lying on the sofa technically alive, at some point it becomes about "the how" to live and not "the if." Characterized by an all out sense of doom or failure, the darkest clouds of depression and worry reign. During such times, my Junk Journal afforded me a tiny reprieve of space.

The recycled old books that nobody cared to read or the dollar store copies I bought because it seemed sad that those did not sell despite the efforts of those artists they were my backbone, my canvas Glue sticks could be ordered and delivered. The construction paper, tacky, and colored pens had been lying about my house unused already.

For example:

Red PAGE: with black ink and clippings reading, "Society Sucks" sideways, I wrote that I am a damn cat apparently, nine lives and all, but I kept on going. Clip by John Crane who felt he was a "walking dead man."

Black PAGE: pasted diagonally with paisleys reads, "If God hates you, you are in good company, it hated Him first," by anonymous and a passage about how we never lose our Salvation. I also pasted, "Don't Let the Plastic Bring You Down" by Sly and The Family Stone, next to Yoda's that there is only "do" in life. The is a stain from one of my tears. Pages and pages of this. Before the "how" ideal came out of me.

Many PAGES: I wrote about how much I fight like Pink, my bloodlines, my past, my conclusions and musings. I wrote to the next generation. I wrote to myself.

PAGE: in white and purple acrylic blotches: There sits an upside down of Bettie Paige rockin' a white bikini next to de Beauvoir saying, "A woman chooses her life, and yet may suffer anxiety and isolation of her non-conformidy and yet can/must remain free." Me: Yes, but... "how?"

The Junk Journal is as yet unfinished too.

I like that it remains that way.

There is space for more, a few pre-glued backgrounds, and ribbon and stickers for where inks bled but I wouldn't change this sapce, noe my journey documented within for anything.

Once when I was a pre-teen I had come across an older journal of mine while cleaning my bedroom. I set out to "correct" it. I ripped out entire pages I found unflattering, a crossed out with a Sharpie, I judge some of the younger ideas as just plain dumb. So what if I had passed gass in math class once, I had thought. But, I forgot just how devastating that situation had been to me at the time and at the time bothering to write about it, apparently.

As a teen, I stood against the FCC and censorship. I would say anything! But, somehow I had missed the point that in my attempt to make a prettier journal, one that the world might better accept, I had lost the very point and artistry of crafting my private self onto a page.

In college, I took a class about the impact of Letters, Journals, and Oral Histories of Women in a historical context. I found a richness and unparalleled beauty in those journals. We wore gloves to turn the decrepit pages at the archive as they threatened to fall apart. I could smell the musty of old- the traditional of women claiming spaces and carving out words to page, if "only" for an audience of their immediate friends or even to themselves.

Did I think about those women as I lay there is 2020 writing and pasting bits as a last resort as my life did depend upon my doing so? No. I cannot clam that I did. However, whether a hundred years ago and written astutely, or by way of recycling what others throw away today, I wrote, I copied, I continued to paste with Elmers, in a manner of speaking, like other women before me.

One can re-write her life. Or, Junk Journal first! There is great joy in the uses of asterisks, rubber cement and/or glitter which has freed up a part of my life.