Sharing about the low-tech aspects of my lifestyle online feels a bit ironic. It would be much more 90's of me to simply write in my journals and leave it at that. These journals are for me. They are a way to document my progress, remember important information, and keep me off my phone during breakfast or whenever I need to wait in line.
So, why do I feel a need to share them here on my blog?
I am a child of the 90's and was lucky enough to grow up painting and collaging before the internet took over every aspect of life & art. And also, I am a millennial who become a teenager right when social media was kicking off. I have these two aspects of my personality; an artist who craves for all things nostalgic, and an artists who just wants to share her work.
Do these two aspects of me need to be in competition?
I have always been interested in journaling. I have notebooks from when I was a child, filled with spelling errors and my emotional turmoils of that time. Now, I have multiple notebooks going on at once. I have one for work, one for content creation, one that is more of a diary, and one for spiritual reasons. If you have been following me here online for a while you have seen a bit of all these journals (except the diary, of course!)
I share these notebooks because I find them to be a way to link myself to the past. Also, I share these pages because these types of posts tend to be my best performing content here on Hive. The positive comments I get on these journal posts are just as valuable to me as the upvotes and HBD. Those comments lead me to the conclusion that, while many of us are getting used to the idea of the internet being flooded with AI generated content, we all crave a world where handmade (heartfelt) art is the norm.
So, here is a look inside the pages of my journals. A place where I write my ideas and dreams. I print out pictures previously stored on my phone and bring them into physical existence.
And, there is something else.
These are notebooks I have had for years. I recycle the pages for new purposes and paste over pages that didn't turn out as I had hoped. Instead of buying a new BuJo each year, I return to the same books again and again until they are full and truly cannot hold anymore. Not only is journaling an anecdote to loosing my ability to create, it is also one small way to reject the influence to buy, buy, buy.
Sometimes old notebooks and old ways are just what we need in this modern world.