Creative Outlets - Journaling

Dear Billy,
I celebrated another trip around the sun, the first without you teasing me about my age and me catching up with you. I have to say, this last year was a humdinger, filled with trials, terror, heartache, heartbreak, loss, exhaustion and depression. I survived (obviously) but it took serious support and caring from family, friends and professionals.

I also had loads of emotional and creative outlets to release the pressures of my experiences. Because of the people and the journals, the correspondence and the painting, the knowledge that I am not really alone, just widowed, I can go through each day with at least one smile on my face. Most days I smile a lot, and often it's due to a funny or loving memory of you.

I attribute this ability to live mindfully in each moment and by my extensive journaling. Most people think, "I can't write" but journaling is not just writing. It is expressing yourself any way you want or can. I just finished the page above. I like to cut out large pictures of faces from magazines and cut them in half. Then I try to sketch the missing half. I could have left the page with only the sketch, but I decided to fill the blank spaces (I hate white space) with quotes about life and art.
Using things I had left on my desk from a previous craft project, and some colored pens, I poured my emotions onto this page. And it felt GOOD. I don't usually show people my journal pages, but it is so liberating to let out the thoughts and feelings, anger and fear, joy and astonishment, the "whole box of crayons" as I call it.

I can write it out, type it out, cut out magazine words and pictures, for your pages. I don't always have a theme to each page. I've used a leftover  notebook from your Bella's art supplies, and have found some awesome journals at thrift stores (yes, dear,I still shop at Goodwill).  The journal above is a composition book from that women's retreat I went on with Joan, in the good old days when the term ALS was something to do with Facebook and the ice bucket challenge.

I'm coming to the end of this journal, but I am in the middle of several others, so no worries. This blog is a journal of sorts, writing to you even though you've gone on ahead of me, and trying to enlighten and encourage other caregivers how to stay on the path of sanity and positivity. Anyway, I was going to post my new journal page on my crafting blog, Patacakes' Pages, but journaling has helped me through some of the roughest times in my whole life most recently, and some of my readers here on this blog might benefit more from what I write than the crafters who visit me on my other blog.

Either way, I would still like to link up my journal page to the ART*JOURNAL*JOURNEY blog for this month's "Recycle and Collage" challenge. If readers want some inspiration to journal, take a look there. It will blow your creative mind.

But remember, journaling is a personal outlet - you don't have to be a writer, a poet, an artist, a "crafter" - you just need a pen, pencil, crayon or marker, scissors, a magazine and a glue stick. I get a lot of inspirational quotes from Pinterest and print and cut them out for some of my pages. However you decide to journal, have fun with it. Be honest. No one else will see it.

You knew how much I needed to journal, Bill. You gave me the time and space to look through magazines and cut out pictures and words. Sometimes I'd show you a page I'd made, something that I thought would cheer us both up. Most pages I kept to myself. Some are full of hope. Some are dark. Some are full of my favorite things. A few just feature a beautiful, peaceful scene with a single quote on the page - that's all.

Thanks for understanding, Bill. Just one more thing I love about you,