It was 2014. Avocado toast and doughnuts were all over my Instagram feed. Before there were TikToks, there were Vine videos. Twitter, now called X, was immensely popular. Everyone was doing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Obama was in his second term as president. This period of time felt peaceful and hopeful. We had passed a recession and the “war on terror,” and for the first time it seemed like society was catching a break.
At the time, I was a college student and aspiring travel writer in my junior year, studying media at Arcadia University, a small liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia. As part of the Honors program, we were required to take leadership courses, and the one I picked was a course on journaling. Looking back I don’t know what that had to do with leadership, but I thought, "Hell yeah, I like writing in my diary.” Little did I know that it was more of an art class. We bound our own notebooks. I had to learn how to sketch, watercolor, use charcoal, and do calligraphy. My hand literally ached from all the drawing — I’m not an artist at all. But somehow my professor got me to create a lovely keepsake that I uncovered from my parents' house a few months ago.
The majority of the journal’s contents were about my lunch and food discoveries in Philadelphia while I was interning at Grid magazine. Some of it is absolutely cringe (see my Chipotle order), but most of the pages are endearing. In the age of being chronically online, I’m so used to taking a pic of my food, posting it on Instagram Stories, and forgetting it. When I wrote this journal, Instagram Stories did not exist yet. The medium of pen-to-paper forced me to slow down and really understand the colors and textures of the meal, down to finding the right shade of brown with yellow specks to illustrate a melty grilled cheese.