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a peek into what was rattling around inside my brain on January 19, 2024:
I have not packed for Madrid, which I am traveling to in 37 hours and 14 minutes and where I will remain for the next three thousand or so hours. I feel like a child; I am desperately nervous for my first days of school. I am twenty and vaguely personable and I give good enough advice for most of my friends to stick around and I am worried that I will make a spectacle of myself. I do not do well in small groups long-term; while I am an acquired taste, I am polarizing enough to always hope for more people to try and advertise myself to. Itās just a very intense experience, dealing with me, for better or worse. I am a good friend and a terrible liar and will keep telling myself that the intensity of my emotions is standard. I am very excited to write postcards. I am most excited about just how Old everything over there is. I keep referring to the next six months as happening in The Old World, which no one finds as amusing as me. I need to find a way to get into every museum I can and spend as long as possible inside them. I really do love being in nature, but very very old pieces of paper are generally not allowed to be Outdoors, and I want to be with very very old pieces of paper.
Iām fully convinced that if I ever break my no-pills-or-powders rule, I will be gone within three years at the absolute maximum, and there will be no silver lining and no dignity to the entire affair. More and more often, I cannot differentiate between anxiety and prudent self-preservation, paranoid leaps in logic or prophetic instinctual knowledge. The drug thing is genetic, and Iām specifically fine with frantic California sobriety as a symptom of my neuroses.
I keep buying small journals because I am trying to convince myself that I am the kind of person who prefers the intimacy and tradition of writing pen-to-paper. Four journals varying widely in dimension, paper type, layout, and date of purchase glare at me from their dusty home on my desk. Instead, my Notes app is filled with several hundred Notes sprawling across six years of iCloud. Titled things like āi like how babies dress but not in a weird way/i wish i could dress like a baby but not in a weird way i just like their outfitsā or a list of every single thing I can think of that differentiates my mother and myself (the list is alarmingly short and the vast majority is dedicated to food one of us does or does not like).Ā
I know that I am taking it all too seriously. I would like to be someoneās muse in theory. In practice, I am too high-strung, and wanting to be someoneās muse is a deeply meaningless and annoying goal to even mostly-joke about having.Ā
Feb 19, 2024
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I love putting my feelings on paper, it helps me to know that theyāre real. Plus, I have way too many thoughts, I canāt hold all that in my head. Some things are best left in a notebook than in the body. I have an incredibly warped sense of time, so I sometimes reread journals to remind myself of what has happened in my life. And wow, thereās nothing more powerful than a preteenās unbridled emotions and Ashley you will pay for what you did in the 5th grade.Ā If I die and someone finds all of my journals please publish them, thereās some good tea in there and Iām not afraid of burning bridges in the afterlife.Ā Get a good pen, find a nice notebook, and put it all down.
Oct 27, 2023
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The other day I went to a coffee shop with the intention of reading my book but instead spent about two hours writing in my journal.
Iām not a great journaler. Itās the kind of relationship where Iāll pick it up when Iām going through something, be really consistent for a couple days, and then once Iām feeling lighter I wonāt touch it for months.
Iām definitely not in the easiest season of life right now, but im not actively shittingscreamingcryingthrowingup about anything at the moment. For some reason though, despite my mentally āupā state of being, I was desperate to write down everything Iāve been thinking and feeling in the past couple weeks.
I honestly think itās why the past couple days I havenāt posted anything on this app is because anything I wouldāve mused about I already wrote in my journal lol. I even considered just taking a picture of the journal pages and posting them here but that felt too intimate? Maybe?
Feb 23, 2025
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This could be one of those rare things that ā somehow ā reminds you who you are, or who you used to be, those parts you thought were gone. (And trust me, there will be threads. So many threads.) Iāve learned, too, that there are whole stretches of life where youāve been a stranger to yourself for so long that admitting it feels terrifying, insane even. But without that one thing to confess to, to get honest with ā to untangle the mess of ordinary, maddening thoughts ā you might never know whatās actually there, buried under the static.
Nov 14, 2024
Top Recs from @ellabella
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builds character. no one is looking at you weirdly i promise just see the movie by yourself bae. if nothing else do it because joan didion also thinks itās a good idea. just donāt isolate
Feb 11, 2024
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guilt is āthis thing i did is badā and shame is āthis thing i did means i am badā
Feb 9, 2024
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a starburst wrapper, a leaf (beware of staining the pages), a journal page with a secret written on it, etc.
Feb 7, 2024