100 Days of Junk Journaling

When you can't stand clutter but can't throw stuff away.

Despite the fact that I have spent the past 46 years of my life — which is to say all the years of my life — thinking almost exclusively about myself, there are still some things about me that remain a mystery to me. One of my biggest personal enigmas is the fact that I both detest clutter, and also cannot throw things away. Or, well. No, that’s not exactly right. I’m really quite ruthless about getting rid of things we don’t need in our house — unless the things in question are: 1) collectible, 2) sentimental, or 3) cute.

By “collectible,” I don’t mean “valuable” or even “trinkets deemed worthy of accumulating by fanciers.” I simply mean “a thing that made my brain light up, and so I decided instead of having one of them, I should have one thousand of them.”

I think perhaps this is a habit I picked up from my great-grandmother, Annie B., who came of age during the Great Depression and saved literally everything, organizing and re-organizing her collections, and leaving little notes behind so our family would know what each treasure meant to her. Three of my favorites of her treasures were her coffee can full of pennies (flying eagle pennies, World War II steel pennies, wheat pennies, reverse wheat pennies), her coffee can full of rocks (mostly from trips to the Great Smoky Mountains, but some were just really cool-looking rocks she found around the farm), and her coffee can full of buttons (buttons! an irrefutably perfect item if ever there was one!).

A handwritten letter my great-grandmother left with her rocks: “These rocks are my most of value possession. Please divide them satisfactorily among you all. Even my old ugly son-in-law shall have one. Love, B.”

I myself have coffee cans full of: bottle caps, tiny jam jars, Lego minifigures, D&D dice, stickers, and, of course, rocks.

That’s all fine and good and general neurodivergence. Same with the sentimental stuff. I literally have every single card, or letter, or note on a scrap of paper that anyone has ever given me. They’re stacked neatly inside a hefty dark oak box with a gold lock that Stacy bought me the year we moved in together.

Where it gets sticky is the cute stuff. You cannot imagine how many cute things printed on paper come into my home for various reasons. And I cannot get rid of any of them. I just stack them up, and then move that stack around, and then stack more cuteness on top of it, and then move that even taller stack around, and on and on until there’s a precarious pile of adorableness just waiting for a cat to knock it over in the middle of the night.

I have never been able to figure out what to do with this compulsion. Sometimes I get lucky and my cats will shred the stacks they topple and I have to throw the stuff away. Or, like, one time after I had surgery on my spine and was stoned to oblivion on the painkillers, I accidentally tossed out my cute stack of cuteness and also my entire sticker collection. (That was a travesty. I did cry. But also I was kinda relieved the pile was gone.)

Well and finally I have discovered the solution to this struggle. I learned it on TikTok (which is also where I learned I should look into getting an autism diagnosis, which made my primary care doctor laugh when I told him because he assumed I already had an autism diagnosis).

It’s called JUNK JOURNALING and it is so glorious. It’s simple too. I bought a 1.5” x 1.5” scrapbook punch, and every day, I pull one item from my cute pile, or one item that recently came into my home that made my brain sing for whatever reason (I freakin love LL Bean catalogs; before this project, I had dozens of years-old LL Bean catalogs stacked up on my bookshelf), and punch out a little square of it and paste it into my journal. That way I get to keep the brain-singing thing, and I get to line it up in an organized little row, which is extra-soothing. Plus also, after only just a couple of weeks, I have amassed a WHOLE NEW COLLECTION OF ITEMS. I can recycle the part that’s not the square punch, clearing out a hill full of clutter, without losing any of the cuteness.

I’ve been junk journaling now for 100 days and my desk has never been so tidy, and my cute items have never been so catalogued!

I love that this journal is starting to become its own story, and all I needed to make it was a three-dollar square punch from the hobby store and a journal that was already sitting in my desk drawer!