Week 3
Week Four
Week Five
Week Six
Week 7
Upon Reflection,
This beauty journal has turned more into just a journal about my life.
I’ve been meaning to journal for a while, because in the last half a year I’ve realized how much worse my memory has gotten. “I can’t believe you remembered that” was once something friends told me, and it was something I held dearly. I now find it hard to remember weekends, meals, the morning once it’s night. A detail I once loved about myself was my ability to catch and hold on to the otherwise mundane but considerably beautiful, and I now find it hard to remember even the largest stand-out moments. My New Yorker calendar is still stuck on February 1st.
I don’t understand why this is happening. It hasn’t been making me feel too great.
Beauty journaling is about appreciating and assigning beauty to specific moments in time. I’ve been using photos as my means for journaling so far because photos are the closest and most honest I can get to capturing just one moment in time; a photo is literally an exact replication of 1/100th of a second in time.
But more than journaling to realize the beauty around me, I think I have been using journaling rather as a method to remember. And down that avenue follows a large amount of reflection, recollection, feeling, and re-feeling.
For one, I have realized that beauty is fleeting. This is a simple and obvious conclusion, that not everything that was beautiful then will/is still beautiful now. I look back at these images and many of them make me smile, some of them make me wonder, some of them take me back to that memory in a very sensory type of way like a visceral flashback. And then some, I just want to scroll past faster. I want to scroll past them, but then something always brings me back, so I scroll back up and stop for a second and I think. I’m not sure if these moments are still “beautiful” (they probably are in some way, as everything is), but they don’t bring me joy. I think about taking them out, but that doesn’t feel right to me. So this is where we are now.
Things have changed. Birthdays have passed, people have come, people have gone. I got sick for a week in the middle, I’ve gotten better, the leaves have changed colors.
I am lucky for the memories I can have, but there is a difference between the things I am able to remember and the those that actually have memorable qualities.
Week 8
Week Nine
Week Ten
Week Eleven
Week 12
Week 13
Week 14
Week 15
Last Week
