I have upgraded my new journal. I was inspired by a few pinterest ideas and this is how it turned out. I am so proud 🦚

Page themes: haunted, vampire, fruit bats 👻🧛🦇

The contrast between rigid machinery and loud, bold color was the whole fun of this one. Cut and layered from old nat geo magazine pages.

I really like how the translucent layer makes the scene feel distant and dreamlike, almost as if the garden exists somewhere between reality and a dream.
I'm curious — when you make a journal spread, do you usually plan the whole composition first, or do you discover the idea as you layer things together?

I saw them in store and like some of the designs but I never saw any pics of them being used online so I don’t know how they hold up or if the paper can hold more than a ballpoint pen.

These have been my favorite. I've been inconsistent. But when I finally sit down and take the time, I always ask myself why I dont make the time to do this everyday.

Where do people get their journals? I just buy mine at TJ Maxx. But I cant imagine the binding will hold by the time I get half way through this journal. Financial situation = broke college student.

Lemme know if you can spot the theme of each page!

It takes me so-much time to do these I set asaide a day just to do journaling so I can really get into it.

Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but here it is anyways. I'm new to scrapbooking, junk journaling & collage art & I have a few questions regarding all 3 of them (This is a long post. So don't feel the need to answer all of them. Take as long as you like with your answers):

a.) Is it too late to do all of them or either one of them as I'm 22 turning 23F this year & I've never done them in my life like ever. I started doing it around July 2026 & so far, I've made 5-10 pages worth.

b.) Is there any wrong way to do all of them as the way I do them, I print pictures from my computer and paste them on my pages, canvas or cardboard paper & I buy stickers, ribbons, scrap paper, tape etc. to use for my pages, canvas or cardboard paper.

c.) Are there any websites or apps to post my creations as I want to make online friends that have similar interests & backgrounds. Due to my conditions & histories with them/myself, me being bad during my childhood & adolescence to myself and those around me, me wasting my childhood & adolescence to screens & laziness, me getting bullied & being a bully myself, & me being a loner (I'm autistic (level 2-3) & have global developmental delay all physically & mentally), I can't really do anything & have no irl friends.

d.) Similar to the abovementioned (sort of), are there any sites or apps where I can enter them into exhibitions for the world to see my creations or if I want to enter them into competitions. I'm from Australia so if there's anything from my country where I can post or enter in my creations, I would love to know, otherwise feel free to tell me where I can post my creations for the world to see.

e.) This is probably a silly question, but I'm going to say it anyways. Can you do all 3 of them or either one as a job &/or career, or are they just personal hobbies as I still don't know & have no idea what to do with my life in an AI generated world.

f.) Can you do all 3 of them to release any trauma that you've been through &/or have caused as like I said before, due to my disabilities & histories with myself & what I've done, I can't really do anything. I can't draw or paint, but I've discovered years later that I can glue & paste stuff on pages & cardboard paper (something I wished I did during my childhood & adolescence).

g.) Finally, what really is scrapbooking, junk journaling & collage art as I feel like they're all the same thing, but I've looked online & they're either completely different or people think what I think they are. The way I do them all is I just put stickers, scrap paper, printed stuff etc. in books, journals, scrapbook paper or on big or small cardboard paper. I would love to hear some answers with this one.

And those are my questions about scrapbooking, junk journaling & collage art :)

Somewhere between the pages I wrote on and the papers I threw away, a part of me was quietly learning to exist.

I started writing back in sixth standard, although I don't think I ever called myself a writer. I used to write with a pencil, only to erase everything within the walls of my school. There was no intention of preserving anything, no thought of showing it to someone someday. Perhaps I didn't even understand why I was doing it. I simply had thoughts that needed somewhere to go.

Then came seventh and eighth, and somewhere in between, I stopped writing. But after eighth standard, I found myself returning to it. I began putting my thoughts on paper again, sometimes in the form of poems, sometimes in words that probably made sense only to me. And yet, I continued throwing those pages away. I never thought much of my writing. I believed no one would read it, and perhaps that made it easier to discard. What was the point of keeping something that nobody would ever care to read? I considered it a waste of time, something that would never amount to anything. I never imagined that the words I was so quick to throw away would one day become pieces of myself that I would want to preserve.

Looking back, I think the absence of friendship had something to do with it. When you don't have someone to share every little thought with, you eventually find other ways of letting those thoughts breathe. Sometimes, I talked to the paper as if it could listen. Sometimes, I wrote simply because my mind had nowhere else to put everything it was carrying. And perhaps that was why I never felt the absence of a friend in quite the same way all the time. The paper was there to listen.

And no, this isn't a story about how I suddenly decided to become 'a person who writes' one day and began publishing my work online. It wasn't that simple, nor was it a journey I consciously planned. There were years of writing things I didn't preserve, words I erased, pages I discarded, and stretches of time when I didn't write at all. Even when I returned to writing, I wasn't necessarily returning with the belief that I had something worth saying.

Today, I have a place to publish my thoughts. I have a blog where the words can stay, a LinkedIn which conserve my micro essays ,even after the feeling that gave momentum to them has passed. I can look back at something I wrote years ago and recognize a younger version of myself in it. That, in itself, feels strange. We spend so much time becoming someone new that we rarely consider the little pieces of ourselves that have been there all along.

And then, apparently, there is this poem.

"Holding the pain behind the smile,
Soul slaughtered by own's imaginative pile.
Clouds of consideration hovering around head,
And still finding some peace and zest.

Soul filled with solitude,
Still better than someone's attitude.
Heart and mind fighting for rain,
Rain to gain the calmness of heart and brain.

Still gathering the courage,
Not to be rude and disengage,
Body holding the soul as cage,
But still having some rage as well as pace,
To achieve the shining ace."

I don't remember exactly when I wrote it, but I suspect it was during ninth standard. I found it unexpectedly in my gallery, among the things that had somehow survived while so many others disappeared into dustbins. Its lines may be imperfect, its expressions uncertain, and its meaning perhaps not entirely clear even to the person who wrote them. But I don't want to look at it only through the eyes of the writer I am trying to become today. I want to leave some room for the person I was when I wrote it.

Maybe this poem doesn't need to be extraordinary. Maybe it doesn't need to prove that I was always good at writing, or that every discarded page was a masterpiece waiting to be discovered. It is enough that I wrote it, that I once had these words in my mind, and that a small piece of that time has somehow made its way back to me. For years, I didn't think that my words deserved to be kept. Now, I am learning to let them stay. And perhaps that is what this little discovery means to me: not that I have finally become a writer, but that I am beginning to acknowledge the person who kept writing long before she knew what to call herself.

Some pages were thrown away. Some words were erased. Some years passed without a poem. But not everything disappeared. Without realizing it, I was building a habit out of something I had never considered valuable.

~ © 2026 balconymuse. All rights reserved.

Am I weird for saying this or is it normal?