I am not a creative person.
Knowing this made me unsure of what to do when it came to the dotted page inside my planner. I preferred lined pages to dotted ones; the latter never suited my large and messy handwriting. The remaining pages began to fill with details such as contact information and to-do lists, but the dotted page remained unused and probably wouldn’t be touched for the rest of the year.
I was convinced that I didn’t need the page until I saw a close friend’s photo on her blog; a page that came from her own planner the year prior. Along the dotted lines were multiple, neatly-drawn squares that were laid out and filled with variants of color. Some squares bloomed red and others were shaded with blue. Upon checking the legend at the right side, I figured that she had used her own page as a mood tracker of sorts.
Mood tracking was a common practice among those who used bullet journals. The concept seemed simple. The dotted page would contain a grid listing the days and months of the year. A legend would lay neatly on the side, with different colors from red to black assigned to particular emotions. On the daily, the owner of the journal would keep track of their feelings and shade the corresponding box according to their dominant mood.
I am not a creative person. The idea of tracking my mood with a complicated system of colors assigned to a limited number of emotions made me nervous for many reasons.
On one hand, the thought of creating an entire system to keep track of my emotions was overwhelming enough. After all, there was so much to plan, so many colors to consider, and an array of emotions that had to be cut to only six or seven. My perfectionist tendencies, coupled with my lack of ability to draw a straight line, was a recipe for disaster and frustration.
On another, I was the type of person who preferred to keep everything in. Keeping track of my emotional being was something I preferred to ignore. There was something unsettling about having to acknowledge the bad days or having to recognize that a heavier mood had lasted longer than a few days. Not having to keep track would at least keep me ignorant. One bad day would be shoved to the back of my mind and stay unprocessed.
But refusing to process my emotions and acknowledge my bad days contributed to the turbulence of the past year. It was the first year that I had gone without a planner, and the first year that things started to weigh down more than usual. Heavier days stayed unprocessed in favor of forcing myself to feel better. Better days remained unappreciated and forgotten. By the end of the year, I was exhausted. Self-care meant sleeping in until noon and still refusing to check in with myself. The days were saturated with blues and dulls and darks; colors that I was afraid to see laid out on the grid.
I am not a creative person. I still prefer lined pages to dotted ones, and I’m still unable to draw straight lines even with the help of a ruler. All I can hope is that all the squares would have some other kind of color in them at the end of the year.
