A Letter About My Journal

Monday, May 25, 2015

Dear Reader,

Today, I decided to invest in a multi-purpose leather-bound journal. It's not exactly a diary, agenda or a simple notebook. I'm not an artist and hence it's not my artsy doodle/art book. But picking it out and buying it was one of the most fun things. 

As a kid, I adored the idea of having a diary to record my thoughts. But as I grew up, the idea of perfection took over. I still wanted a journal, but I wanted the things written in it to matter. I wanted them to be well written and pretty, as well. The problem with free hand writing is, perfection is hard to get especially with my wobbly handwriting. It's surely not like typing where errors can be easily backspaced out of existence and bad formatting can be quickly fixed. Writing in a journal is a one draft activity and it's terrifying to a person so out of practice.

Today I wrote my first entry, and it was a bit of a disaster but I'm a little bit of a disaster and I love myself very much. I also loved the moments I spend sitting tucked away in a corner seat at Starbucks and writing that post with the smell of leather wafting of my new baby.

Writing free hand is very different from typing. They summon different words, they take different forms and while anything you write stays on the internet forever. Things you write in your journal stay close to you forever.

I hope to take my journal around with me everywhere. I want to write recipes, music recommendations, to-do lists, book ideas, blog posts and reviews in it. It'll embody my art that often takes the shape of a not-so-eloquently-but-uniquely-Mari group of words. 

-MARI

Instagram: thesireniccodex