I started this site when I was seventeen as a proof of life to and for myself. I didn’t have any grand objective with it, nor do I now. I just love to feel as much as I can in every moment. I just love to write.

With the explicit intent of not memorializing the earliest, roughest stages of my cognitive and behavioral coming-of-age, I think in journaling I’ve been able to clear up some of the brain fog I’ve found myself in, via mental and physical illnesses, for the last few years.

I know how to see beauty in pain, but I’m working on seeing beauty in progress — allowing things to run their course; making a space for some gray in all my black-and-white thinking; finding the middle ground between overdone cautiousness and reckless self-destruction.

You’ll see in my entries, if you choose to read them, some unmistakably bad writing. Unnecessary descriptions and sentences that don’t lead anywhere and entire pages that make you (and me) wonder what I was thinking when I wrote them. This is okay, by my standards, as part of the trade-off that lets me watch my past emotions play out without wholly reliving them, or correcting the mistakes I let myself make in the moment that I might not now.

You will also see a progression begin to emerge in the space between lines of my writing, and in the days or weeks that separate each of my entries. My goal is to learn how to see that progression, too, and use a newfound knowledge of its presence to find gratitude, stability, and ultimately myself.

I invite you to join me in this exploration of a young woman’s identity and search for agency, through my fictitious encounters with people I’ve loved, rhetorical analyses of my favorite albums, and, I admit, some intangible thought processes that I messily penned late at night without the knowledge of my conscious mind.

I’m not sure where this endeavor will lead us. I suppose that’s the true dilemma of it all. But do come along. I’d love your company.

With love,

Emma