How Bullet Journaling helped me go with the flow
Have you heard of bullet journaling? In short, it's a journal/planner/to do list method created by Ryder Carroll (who, fun fact, also has ADHD) to organize your life on paper rather than digitally. I learned about it 3 or so years ago, and before that, I was already obsessed with journaling and list making.
Here is the introductory video from the creator, Ryder Carroll
Here is my blog post on bullet journal basics
Both those links should give you a good starting point into understand what bullet journaling is. However, this post is a little different. I am going to talk today about how bullet journaling helped improve my artistic and organizational skills, while also teaching me some valuable skills about flexibility and perfectionism.
I have a particular memory of being young, maybe six years old, and getting this really exciting coloring story book as a gift for a birthday or holiday. I dove right in, coloring the pictures on the first page with my crayola markers, until I came to a horrifying discovery-- the paper was relatively thin, and my colors had seeped through to the next page.
It took me years to get over that incident. I don't know why I was so gosh darn upset, but in my mind, my perfect coloring book was ruined because the first page leaked onto the second page.
Flash forward 15 years or so, and I am making mistakes left and right in every beautiful journal I own. I am making mistakes in my knitting, in projects that took me hours to complete that are now going to be pulled apart because the size is just slightly too large. And you know what? That's okay.
I really hate it when people use mental illnesses as an adjective. A specific one I hear a lot is OCD, as in "this design is giving me OCD" or "this organization system makes my OCD happy". No, that's not what OCD means. I have the messiest room in the entire house, and I have diagnosable OCD tendencies.
"OCD" is not a synonym for "type A". OCD is not a synonym for "perfectionist". I don't know how we ended up here, but this point has to be made.
But I digress. My point is, having OCD and being a perfectionist didn't mean that I was neat or organized or my handwriting was perfect. Those were manifestations that emerged because I stuck with bullet journaling for years.
My first bullet journal wasn't artistic at all. It was a little purple moleskine notebook I picked up at the airport on my way home from traveling in Israel with fellow college students, both Jewish and non-Jewish (The David Project Israel Uncovered).
I wish I kept my first Bullet Journal, and to be honest, I probably have it somewhere on a shelf stuffed between all the other half finished poems and diaries I kept throughout my life.
There's something very special about having a daily log of your life to look back on, to see how your life was shaped by not only the big events but also by what you ate for breakfast, or your tasks, or what people you were hanging out with on a given day. Now, I have all my Bullet Journals lined up and dated, as a record, an archive, of my life.
But going back to my main point, bullet journaling helped to expand my creative mind and be more okay with mistakes. I found ways to edit and adjust and even if it's not perfect, it's representative of my life. My life has days that are beautiful calligraphy and doodles and stickers and there are days when I cover up my mistakes with stickers and jot down my thoughts in whatever pen I can find nearest to me.
The point is, I am not perfect and neither is my Bullet Journal. I aspire to be better but I don't expect perfection, not in my daily activities, my life, my art, or my bullet journal.
We are all learning and growing. Mistakes are a regular part of daily life, and learning to work with them and work around them is what creativity is all about.
With love and strength,
Rivi
Rivi's Tips for BuJo Mistakes:
1. Stickers!
Stickers make everything better, even mistakes. You can get some packs of decorative stickers at Michael's or Target or a couple bucks, which will give you options for sizes and designs depending on how large of a space you want to cover.
For some reason, this has been incredibly helpful for me. I am not great at drawing straight lines, and it's also something that I am not particularly picky about. So, when I draw a line, either in a letter or on a page, and it comes out slightly crooked, I'll highlight it or go over it with a marker to give it a bit of a more artistic feel.
3. Elaborate with quick lines and doodles
In this spread, which I think looks great now, I was trying to draw a film reel with no reference photo. Also, I'm a millennial, so I don't have a great reference base for film strips, period. After I realized that this was not turning out the way I liked, I added some scribbles and doodles and I ended up liking the finished look.
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