Last December, I decided I wanted to start bullet journaling.

For those unfamiliar, a bullet journal is a journal whose pages consist of a grid of dots, rather than a series of lines. The idea, roughly, is that what fills the pages of the journal is much more customizable than just prose. You can, of course, use it for that, but most people use a bullet journal as a combination of many other things: a calendar, a to-do list, a scrapbook, a planner, a reading log, or any number of other useful and creative functions, all of which you can format carefully using the grid provided as a baseline.

When I decided I wanted to start using a bullet journal, I didn’t have in mind any particular uses, so when I first sat down to start working on it, I found myself staring at a blank grid, pencil in hand, unsure how to even begin.

I first became interested in writing when I was in elementary school. I liked to write little fantasy stories and such, reflections of what I liked to read at the time, and the same remained true through middle school, where I started getting positive feedback on writing assignments. At that age, it doesn’t take much for something to become a central part of your identity, so being “a writer” was quickly etched into my sense of self for the first time.

Middle school was also when I started to excel in music, entering competitions and attending camps and whatnot, so music quickly took its place next to writing. By the time I was in high school, and people started talking about my ~future~, I thought I had it pretty made. It seemed like I had an easy path going forward—two pursuits that I was good at, that I enjoyed, and that I could follow through college into a career. I entered college with the intent of majoring in both, and, surprisingly, I was able to do so without changing plans much.

But things were already starting to slow down. Because I had chosen not to go specifically to a music school, the ideals of achievement in music that had motivated me in high school no longer felt attainable. I spent increasingly more time simply completing music assignments, and less time focusing on improving at an instrument or working towards a performance. Meanwhile, all my writing was being done for classes, so the act of writing felt much more like work than like artistic creation. In both cases, I was extremely eager to finally graduate, so I could take ownership of my passions and pursue my own personal projects, with the benefit of a college degree as experience.

Once I graduated, though, I lost what little momentum I had left. I started a job at Starbucks, and I was free to do whatever I wanted with my free time; but instead of feeling limitless possibility, I felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me. The cost of my newfound freedom was a total crumbling of the structure that had supported my interests in the first place. Suddenly, months were passing and I was hardly engaging in writing or music at all. I wanted a creative outlet, but it felt like I had forgotten how to even do creative work. In fact, the post calvin was the only thing motivating me to create anything, because it still had the necessary features: external, and with a deadline.

But in retrospect, I hadn’t forgotten anything. Rather, I had never learned to actually do creative work in the first place. At least, not the way I would’ve liked.

In music, I had been driven by an image of myself as a talented, skilled, enviable ~musician~. I thrived on positive feedback, sought out competition, and felt satisfied when I could see myself living up to that image—both in my own perception, and in that of those I looked up to. Even in ensembles, I wanted recognition just as much as I wanted to make music, to the extent that it probably got in the way of making friends. I enjoyed music plenty, but mostly by accident, incidentally in the pursuit of excellence. I never really learned how to do music for music’s sake, or just for myself.

I had a similar image of myself as a ~writer~, too, but it was a bit more practical. I completed essays and papers with only moderate effort, received good grades on them, and saw myself easing into some sort of nebulous writing career, seamlessly leveraging the skills I had been practicing through school. But my ideas for personal projects always seemed to be somewhere on the horizon, just out of reach. In middle school, I wanted to write fantasy, but I felt as though I wasn’t old enough yet. In high school, I wanted to write a DnD campaign, but I didn’t have a group to play with yet. In college, I wanted to write about the enneagram, but I needed to research more about it first. All my creative ideas perpetually took a backseat to my schoolwork writing, on the premise that I was never quite ready to get started. So I never even learned to write what I wanted to write, let alone write for writing’s sake.

It’s now been two years since I graduated college, and my relationship with my own art is as uncertain as it’s ever been. But I do have one thing going for me: the bullet journal. Since January, I’ve been filling its pages with a variety of things I decided on individually—some inspired by the ideas of others, but all ultimately tailored to myself. It’s been providing me with a sense of ownership over my creative work that I’m starting to get more used to, and… that’s nice.

Bullet journaling doesn’t have all the baggage of writing and music, because it’s brand new to me. I never saw myself becoming a ~bullet journal guy~, so it’s a little easier to explore the feeling of creating in a more pure form, somewhat separate from notions of my identity, my career, and my broader creative aspirations. I’ve even been doodling and drawing a bit in the margins, despite having no experience in visual art. That doesn’t matter, because at least for now, it’s just for myself. I’m doing it because I enjoy it, and that’s a good enough reason on its own.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.