Bullet Journal Feels

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I have a super special treat for you today!  My oldest daughter, Jordan, discovered bullet journaling several months back and I really thought it would be a perfect opportunity for her to prepare a guest post for my readers.  I’m so thrilled that she was willing and have to say she blew me away!  It took me over a week to pull this together because every time I read it I’m overcome with emotions and pride and my heart is so full of hope and I just know you will love it as much as I did!  So here she is with her very first, but hopefully not last, guest post.  Who knows, maybe she will even find a little cyber space of her own!

My mom and I have discussed a guest post several times this summer, and I have absolutely been interested but didn’t know quite how to start or what I wanted to talk about. She has suggested doing a post on pages in my bullet journal, and today I decided just what part of my experience with bullet journaling I wanted to share.

When I was a kid, I always enjoyed writing. Fiction mostly. Stories about horses, about dreamers, about people I made up.  I think those little stories were my first escape attempts from a reality we cannot control. As I grew up, writing became more of a task, a grade, something I was judged on, and inevitably I began to resent it. I’ve read some of my work from school, and I wonder why I grew to hate writing so much. I was good at it, and I wish desperately that I had continued to practice it.

I think I rediscovered this love when I found bullet journaling. I found a concept for consolidating my every day plans and lists with my ideas and creativity.

 

I love words. I have found sentences in books and in articles that are such wonderful combinations of words that I want to reread them over and over and recreate something just as beautiful.
I see this especially when I am feeling sad or lost, and I start reading about God. I find words, phrases, quotes, and lines that overwhelm my heart, and I can’t help but want to put my pen to paper.

I’ve found (as I’m sure most people often do) that the minute I go searching for God, I find exactly what I was looking for to pull me through that helpless moment. Today, I wanted some of the comfort I felt from reading Annie F. Downs’ book Looking for Lovely: Collecting the Moments that Matter. A must read if you, like I do, struggle with finding lovely things in ugly circumstances. In perusing Annie’s website, I found this article she wrote for (in)courage.

“What if this year we just hoped like crazy? The kind of hope that can feel scary and look embarrassing and may blow up in your face”

Exactly! Today I was feeling like this hope I have been feeling in my personal life is an embarrassment, that it made me weak. And there she was; Annie, telling me that I’m wrong. In the top right corner of this website, there is a search bar. Following Annie’s lead, I typed the word HOPE.

I began to read the articles. I read some sentences over and over. And I needed to write. I needed to document all of this information about hope. I took every meaningful phrase, every meaningful sentence, and I wrote it all in a spread in my journal. It was therapeutic. Physically writing out these words helped ease my worries. I read them, I felt them, and surprisingly I wanted to share them with all of you.

And so here I am, not just copying down someone else’s words, but wanting to share those words through writing my own. My first ever guest blog post for my lovely mother. I’m not sure it is what either of us envisioned when we discussed a post about bullet journaling. Or what either of us thought I would write about at all. But I felt, and I wrote. I can only hope that it might encourage you to do the same.

Love, Jordan

So what do you think?  I know, she’s incredible!  Does this spark your interest in starting a bullet journal?  I’ve pinned tons of great ideas but keep in mind no two journals should be the same and it is ever evolving.

Click to see where I’m linking today!