Last year I did something I never do: I kept a new year’s resolution.  I tend not to make resolutions because – if we’re being honest – I’m about as fickle as they come.  Someone once told me that being fickle is evidence of an active mind.  I’ll go with that awfully positive outlook on a trait that I view as less-than-desirable.

My resolution was to keep a journal, a sketchbook, a place where I keep all of the things that meant something to me all in once place.  I didn’t write in it every day, but I kept coming back to it for the entire year.  To be able to look back on a year of my life in this tangibly strange, unfiltered form was, over all, a very good experience.  To put down on paper what’s in my head without hesitation is perhaps one of the hardest things for me to do.  I like to please people, I only want to make waves if they’re that warm, beachy kind.  So to try, just a little bit at a time, to move away from thinking of how other people will judge me was one of the most important things I learned.  Because I knew that no one would see what I was working on, I got to make whatever I wanted.  Turns out I ended up wanting to share a lot of it with the world (or at least my close friends… and apparently the internet too).