A Life Spent Putting Pen to Paper

2001

Unfiltered

My earliest journals are filled with scribbles, loops, and lines that maybe meant something to me at the time.

I was three years old. I couldn't write yet. But something in me already wanted to put pen to paper and get whatever was inside, out.

I have been journaling ever since. I didn't have a word for it then. I just knew it made me feel better.

2011

Life Lessons

On my thirteenth birthday, I was introduced to an idea that would change everything.

A dear family friend, Deneb, sat me down after I blew out my candles and asked me to write down my 13 life lessons. I didn't fully understand it. But I did it.

The tradition is simple: every year on your birthday, you write down as many lessons as the age you're turning. No rules. No right answers. Just the truest things you know right now.

I have done it every birthday since. Somewhere along the way I started asking everyone around me to do it too—friends, strangers, people celebrating their birthdays at the table next to me.

In 2025, 110 people shared their life lessons with me. What began as a personal ritual slowly became something shared —wisdom collected across years, seasons, and lives.

2020

Between Friends

This one started simply. I bought a journal, wrote in it for a couple of months, and mailed it to my best friend from high school who lived in another state.

She read what I wrote, kept it for a few months, wrote in it herself, and sent it to another one of our friends. Since then it's been passed between four different people.

When one of my friends said she didn't know what to write, I realized the journal needed a little more structure, so the Between Friends journal was born. Guided prompts alongside open space, because sometimes you need a question to get the conversation started.

It's a way to watch a friendship change and grow over years. I genuinely cannot wait to read ours back in five years.

Journaling and friendship have always been important parts of my life, so it's even more meaningful to be able to create something and put it out into the world to help other long-distance-besties connect through shared pages.

2026

Gratitude!

I'll be honest, I always thought I was a grateful person. I just never had a dedicated place to practice it.

In March of 2026, my friends and I made ourselves a challenge: every morning and every evening, write down three things you're grateful for.

Three weeks in and something shifted. One morning I woke up to the sound of the trash truck outside—loud, squeaky, the kind of thing that usually makes me pull a pillow over my head. And instead I thought: I am so grateful for that truck and the person driving it, who comes every single week so I don't have to haul my trash to the dump.

That's when I knew. This gratitude journal needed to exist.

Gratitude is rewiring my brain. I think it might rewire yours too.