Task Journal Vol. 5

In 8th or 9th grade, right as the pandemic hit full force, I started what I call a "task journal." The concept of this journal is that it is a book I use to collect my thoughts and organize myself. Most of that came in the form of checklists and bulletpoints. One of the crucial things I changed with this task journal compared to my other journaling attempts, is that I did not give myself rules. I told myself that if I tried to organize it, I was doing it wrong. I didn't write entries, I didn't label things, I had no consistency, half of the pages were random doodles, and it worked better than I could have imagined.

I painted the cover of my first task journal because I was bored and didn't want to clean my room. When I finished that task journal, I decided to paint my next one. So on and so forth.

When I got to volume 5, my senior year task journal, I knew I should spend some time on the cover painting. I decided to paint a door, with stained glass windows, and plants growing through the open crack. The door is symbolic of change, since senior year is going to be my last year of childhood. The windows and plants were mostly just aesthetics but they felt so intrinsically >me< that I think they are symbols anyways.