07/27/2026
The Beautiful Mess of It
what junk journaling taught me about letting things be unfinished
There is a shoebox in my closet that I have never been able to throw away. A ticket stub from a movie I don't remember the plot of. A pressed flower gone the color of tea. A grocery list in my son's seven-year-old handwriting, the letters still learning which way they faced. For years these things had no home except that box, no purpose except to be kept. Then I found junk journaling, and I realized the box had been trying to tell me something all along.
Junk journaling, if you haven't stumbled into it, is exactly what it sounds like and also nothing like it. You take the scraps — receipts, washi tape, torn envelope corners, a child's crayon scribble, a line from a book that stopped you cold — and you glue them into a notebook without asking them to make sense. There's no rule that says the page has to be pretty. There's no rule that says it has to mean anything yet. You just keep the thing, and you let proximity do what it wants with meaning later.
I came to it exhausted by a different kind of keeping. My work asks me to document precisely — dates, findings, the careful language of a report where every word has to hold up to scrutiny. My teaching asks for clarity too, lessons that build logically toward understanding. I spend most of my days making things make sense. So the first time I sat down with a glue stick and a stack of ephemera and gave myself permission to just paste things next to each other because I liked how they looked together, something in my chest loosened that I hadn't known was clenched
