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What you need right now is an instant relief. An easy, no-brainer, immediate solution. Something that will soothe that horrible feeling of despair, so that you can begin to think clearly.

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At least now, I am adding to the same journal. And now, I’m seeing so many benefits from my sucking at keeping a journal.

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The girl who journals is someone who is accepting of life’s highs and lows. She finds words to capture the spectrum of human emotion. She dances with vivacious adjectives for her happiest days, and embraces cold words for her loneliest nights.

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When my high school’s drama program announced the spring show, Les Miserables — one of the most beautiful and tragic broadway musicals to date — I couldn’t bring myself to audition. Aspirations were questioned. They were changing.

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I’ve been reading my old journals lately. It started when my best friend disputed my recollection of something from our twenties.

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Over time my notebooks turned from an impulse to a compulsion, opening a fresh notebook to find opportunity, obligation.

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In English, we had a long and sometimes heated discussion on open enrollment. Generally, I support it, but I think we have to redefine “college” itself. We got into the basic question, which is — naturally — race.

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Susan Sontag’s early journals guide us through those tumultuous years of our teens and twenties when emotional intelligence is trying to grow up alongside the rest of our brain, but can’t seem to keep from falling behind.