Journey Journal

As part of the Journey in Literature class, the professor had the students develop a journal in which we were to write in each day. The writing process had to be a reflection of each of the student's stream of consciousness and had to flow naturally, including mistakes, misspelled words, randoms thoughts, and so on. To make our journals even more personal, we had to decorate the cover and back-cover with pictures that represented us and our different journeys. 

I sat down with a bunch of magazines trying to figure what pictures represented me the most. After a while I noticed that I was having a much easier time when I focused on phrases and words that meant something to me. I did, however find some pictures of places that were meaningful to me and so, the first area of my journal are either places that I have visited, like California and New York, or places I want to visit, such as Paris, England and Holland. Even though I haven't had that much travel experience, my dream is to take a year off and go everywhere I've always dreamed of going to take in different cultures and gain so many different experiences in life. 

The second area of my journal is focused mainly on my internal journeys -past, present and future. To represent these I cut different phrases or words that stood out to me. Some of these were: renewal, now, change, what's ahead, driven by dreams, "search for: ", and unravel. I am in the midst of figuring out who I am and who I ultimately want to become. I've slowly grown and started making that transition from being a naïve adolescent to a young adult that still makes plenty of mistakes along the way, but tries to learn from them as much as possible.

The third area is mostly centered around the things I want to accomplish in life while I still have the passion and drive to do them, such as: save for a once-in-a-lifetime family trip, ride a vespa, start something curious, learn a new language, among many others. I strongly believe that by stepping out of my comfort zone I can discover what I truly want out of life. By trying new things I can also get to know myself a little bit better along the way. Through the class I learned that a person can change so much just by stepping out of their bubble and traveling. A journey is so much more than just taking a plane; you grow as a person mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and sometimes even physically if you just allow yourself to be open to change and all its magic.

This is how the journal finally turned out!