This piece is from 2020, but – as often with paper journals – evergreen:
One student, a slight girl with dark eyes, dark hair, and a sweet determined demeanor, had the most beautiful journal I had ever seen. It was a small red book inside of which she both wrote and made collages from the scraps of papers she shed just walking through her life—ticket stubs and business cards, a photograph, seashells collected on vacation, sand—it was all glued into her book. Words wove their way around the images.
Hers was a combination of scrapbook, journal, and artwork, mesmerizing to look at and, she told me, calming to create. She gave herself time each day to spend with the journal. It freed her, allowed her to contemplate experience, process it.