Some People Collect Shoes, Photos or Memories ...
I Collect Your Life Lessons
2001
I Started "Journaling" Before I Knew What It Was
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
The Sentence That Changed Everything
On my thirteenth birthday, I blew out my candles at my mom's best friend Deneb's house, a woman I loved like a second mother. She asked me,
"Kes, write down your 13 life lessons."
I didn't fully understand it. But I did it. And I've done it every birthday since. That was 14 years ago.
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.
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 family tradition slowly became something shared—wisdom collected across years, seasons, and lives.
2022
"Sisterhood of the Traveling Journal" Starts
I had been living 4,000 miles away from some of my closest friends for seven years and wanted a way to stay connected.
Now these girls aren't just any friends, I've been best friends with them since we were 14 years old. That's half my life!
I decided to start a journal that we could pass between each other. I bought a journal, wrote in it for a couple of months, and mailed it off to one of the girls. She read it. Wrote in it. Sent it to another friend. Since then it's been passed between the four of us a few times, growing each time.
What I didn't expect was how much closer it made us. Not because we were sharing big dramatic news—but because we were sharing the small, ordinary, real things.
One of my friends told me she didn't know what to write. That's when I realized the journal needed a little structure and that's why I created The Between Friends journal.
It exists for the friendships that survive distance. The ones that deserve more than a group chat. The ones you want proof of in ten years, in twenty, when you pull this journal off a shelf and remember exactly who you were to each other (and hopefully still are all those years later).
2026
How the Trash Truck Changed My Life
I always thought I was a grateful person. I just never had a dedicated place to practice it.
In 2026 I joined a self-development book club. One of our monthly challenges was simple:
Every morning and every evening, write down three things you're grateful for. I committed to it without thinking too hard about it.
Three weeks in, something shifted and I immediately had to voice note my friends in the book club.
One morning I woke up to the trash truck outside.
Ugh, so terrible, loud, squeaky, exactly the kind of thing that usually makes me pull a pillow over my head.
Right when I heard it making a ruckus outside my house I thought to myself "I hate the trash truck..." and in that SAME half-asleep thought I then thought "I am so grateful for the trash truck and for the trash man hauling away my trash every week so I don't have to deal with it."
That's when I knew this practice was changing me.
Gratitude isn't about pretending everything is fine. It's about training yourself to see the good in everything!
This journal is a daily reminder that your life, exactly as it is right now, is already full of amazing things.
2026
Your Life Lessons Becomes a Brand
I made these journals because I genuinely believe that the most important things any of us will ever learn don't come from books or podcasts.
They come from living. From the friendships that survive distance. From the morning you're half asleep and suddenly grateful for a trash truck.
These journals are for the women who's been "meaning to" write it down. The one who knows her life is full of things worth keeping—she just hasn't had the right place to put them yet.
That's what I'm handing you.
Now go write something worth keeping.
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