Some of these things I had even forgotten I had kept, reminding me of experiences I had in only the past year. This, to me, served as further proof of the necessity to collect these items.
I don’t like throwing out my old things, I never have. I keep a box of old birthday cards under my bed and I always ask for a copy of my receipt. I have more fortune from fortune cookies than I could ever need and still hang on to tags from clothing items bought three years ago. You name it, and I most likely have it stashed somewhere in one of many manilla envelopes I stuff with what most people would call junk.
But recently, instead of letting all of this “junk” gather dust, I started to make something semi-productive out of these artifacts. That is, I started junk journaling. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, think of it like scrapbooking – cutting, pasting and arranging pictures, decorative stickers and papers onto a page. But instead of buying your supplies from an art store, the majority of the supplies you use are from, you guessed it, junk!
The first time I junk journaled was last April when my exams wrapped up earlier than expected. After being inspired by one too many Tiktoks, I grabbed those manilla folders, my wallet, and that paper bag from the top drawer of my dresser, dumping everything onto my living room table. To the ordinary eye, it would look like a mountain of trash: old receipts, sticky notes, scars of paper, even gum wrappers. But to me, this had been fragments of my life from the past year.
There was something therapeutic about getting to revisit all of these pieces and moments as I attempted to arrange them onto a page. Some of these things I had even forgotten I had kept, reminding me of experiences I had in only the past year. This, to me, served as further proof of the necessity to collect these items.
I am not the first to express this fear, but I am scared of forgetting what my life is like now. What it was like yesterday, what it was like last week and last month. I viciously cling to the materiality of moments and memories because I often feel like I can’t trust recollections of my own experiences. I once read somewhere that every time you recall a memory, you’re remembering the last time you thought of it, not the moment itself. This is horrifying to me, as if my memories are a hallway of mirrors.
I have the tendency to go through memories over and over again, to write about them over and over again. The more time passes, I find it harder to reconstruct the memory in my mind. The harder it is to call up all the specific details the affective details, the visual and emotional, the details. I am quite a stubborn person, and currently, I am still regularly having disputes with the passage of time. It won’t stop passing no matter how much I beg it to. Which is why I keep everything. Junk journaling makes me feel a little more at ease with these tendencies.
Through this practice, I get to preserve these little scraps and pieces of moments I can’t physically go back to. I get to create a tangible record of the things I did, the person I was. The materiality of memories is a concept I am especially drawn to, now that we are in, what is essentially, a digital blackout age. These journals will act not only as nostalgic artifacts for my own reflection but perhaps as proof of my young life for whoever stumbles upon it. Maybe no one will scroll through my Instagram in a few years, but these journals might still sit on my bookshelf, waiting to be rediscovered.
As I pieced together my first junk journal, the physical act of cutting and pasting from the piles of things I deemed worthy of holding onto also made me realize how selective memory is – what we choose to remember and what gets forgotten,. But now, instead of overflowing folders with random items, I got to keep all of my “trash”. All of my unnecessary objects, all of the things taking up too much space in my drawers. Junk journaling allowed me to put them on display. I now have one glued and tapped-together book that sits on my bookshelf, a testament to my life last year. I was able to make something beautiful out of these items. Making, dare I say it, art out of my trash.
Junk journaling is more than just a fun and creative outlet – it’s a practice in nostalgia and memory preservation. It’s a practice of remembering. It is a practice in maybe trying to make something pretty. It doesn’t have to be neat, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be yours. I encourage you all to give it a try.