Journals have always been part of my life. I still have a Lisa Frank journal, Harriet the Spy-inspired notebooks, and plenty of lock-and-key diaries from my childhood. It’s not something I’ve ever really given up. Sometimes I’ve slowed, and some are missing—burned on purpose to erase memories I thought were good—but it’s always been there.
💭 Pages catching the thoughts I was too scared to say out loud.
🤫 A home for secrets too shy to share.
💜 A place to capture memories of my beautiful life lived.
That girl never really stopped writing—she just grew into different notebooks.
I currently have four active journals. A single journal just can’t contain me. One catches memories, one plans the future, one holds the art of life, and one holds gratitude for it all.
Free Write Journal – The unfiltered one.
These are the pages where my hopes, dreams, and anxieties spill out. If I’m being honest, this is mostly where anger and frustration live, which is why I’ve been neglecting it—and why I’m trying to change that. I love that it’s a place where I can vent, but I also want it to hold my best memories and the most beautiful parts of my life.
I hope one day my children—maybe even my grandchildren—can lose themselves in these pages and feel proud of who I was and the life I lived.
The 5-Minute Journal – The steadying one.
Here lives my five minutes of peace at the start and end of each day. It’s a simple book you can pick up at Chapters (here in Canada), and each day begins with a quote and the same gentle prompts.
Morning ☀️
I am grateful for…
What would make today great?
Daily Affirmation
Evening 🌙
Highlights of the Day
What did I learn today?
This simple formula creates space for positivity first thing in the morning and a memory catch at the end of the day—always bringing it back to something good. That’s why I enjoy this daily practice so much.
Quaintrelle Journal – The romantic one.
This one is different. It holds words not as they happen, but after they’ve been reflected on, steeped in time, and edited with a healed heart. It’s soft. Often broken. Spontaneous.
It holds my prose poems—little bites of self-reflection that I hope to one day publish under the title Midnights in Apartment #3. This journal doesn’t exist to fix anything; it merely witnesses the broken parts and lets them breathe.
Bullet Journal – The anchoring one.
This book holds all of my to-dos—my daily bible, if you will. Lists. Events. Calendars. Reminders.
If you’re looking for a flexible and/or more creative way to plan your life, I recommend looking into bullet journalling. A Bullet Journal is a paper-based personal organization method developed by Ryder Carroll. If you’re more disciplined than I am, you could likely fit all the journal types I’ve mentioned here into one.
Mine holds the logistics so my creativity can overflow between other covers.
I don’t have one journal because I am not one thing. That’s evident here on this blog. I’m my roots, my creativity, my mental health, my travels.
I am a planner, but I am also chaos.
I am grateful, but I am also grieving.
I am helpless, but I am also a healer.
I am a writer, but I am also the muse.
I am all of these things between different covers. Each journal holds a version of me. None of them are performance—because the only one I have to show up for is me.
