When I was a kid, I used one of those pink diaries with the locks on it (not that it mattered too much ... you could pick them with a bobby pin). It was cute, it had a bear wearing a tutu and ballet slippers on the cover. From time to time when I decide to do an overhaul of my room and clean it, I'll flip through the pages and laugh at my barely legible handwriting. There isn't anything really important written on those pages, just accounts of what happened throughout the day.
In middle school, I wrote in a small blue notebook. Rather than starting each entry off with "Dear Diary" or "Dear Journal" (I adopted the "Dear Journal" after reading Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary), I decided to name my journal Amy. Why? I liked it and I was totally sure that one day, I'd name my daughter Amy. For the record books, I don't particularly care for the name anymore. That journal is filled with the antics of young adolescence - crushes, being heartbroken, and the drama that middle school friendships bring. Entertaining? Yes ... Quality literature? Definitely not.
I took a hiatus from journaling in high school. This was probably because of time constraints caused by a busy co-curricular schedule and the surfacing of a tiny, yet semi-important social life. The most writing outside of school assignments I did were either in the form of love letters or odes to friendship in yearbooks.
Probably my most shameful journal writing took place upon the dawn of blogs - my first couple years of college. THE blogsite to be on at the time was Xanga. Born was kikotomo, my blog name, inspired from a borrowed name tag I wore at work. If someone were to unearth this aberration they would be barraged with a slew of "woe-is-me homesickness", "I don't know what's wrong with my relationship blues", and "this is what I'm eating because I'm gaining too much weight self-consciousness". Don't bother looking for it - I've deleted it for obvious reasons.
On the contrary, some of my best journal writing takes place in the namesake of this blog. From the burial of kikotomo forward, I've kept an unruled composition tablet that allows the freedoms of doodling, sketching, and writing to my heart's content. When I look back at past entries, I've realized how much I have grown. A recurring theme in my entries is a desire to expand my experiences - and have fun along the way.
