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I found my science journal from 1st grade (1999) where I documented my celery experiment and the classroom butterflies and their many stages. I also found another journal from 2002 where I also documented butterflies. I didn’t realize how many times I did this as a kid.

Here is an excerpts from my 2002 journal:
“Well we had butterflies grow at my house and they hatched and one butterfly was cripple and he couldn’t fly.”

Like all attitudes, tolerance is often taught in subtle ways. Even before they can speak, children closely watch — and imitate — their parents. Kids of all ages develop their own values, in great part, by mirroring the values and attitudes of those they care about. Tolerance refers to an attitude of openness and respect for the differences that exist among people. Although originally used to refer to ethnic and religious differences, the concepts of diversity and tolerance can also be applied to gender, people with physical and intellectual disabilities, and other differences, too. Tolerance means respecting and learning from others, valuing differences, bridging cultural gaps, rejecting unfair stereotypes, discovering common ground, and creating new bonds. Tolerance, in many ways, is the opposite of prejudice. Tolerance also means treating others the way you would like to be treated.

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As I catalog each journal I'll be featuring excerpts in hopes of creating a short story or poem that includes a little from each. I’ll be working with themes of nostalgia, identity, memory, the passage of time, identity, and childhood.

On the eve of the many tree lightings around the city, I found an excerpt from my first journal from 1999. It’s more of a how-to-guide for how to use a disco ball.

Here is a fun excerpt: “The disco light is very light you can pick it up and carry it anywhere. It only weighs about a pound. Once you start to use the disco light you will see all different kinds of colors… “You better not spill a drink on it because you could get an electrical shock and that would hurt very much.”

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Since November is National Novel Writing Month I thought it would be a fun idea to reflect back on my many sketchbooks that contain stories I’ve written, stretching back as far as 2nd grade when my mom and I would write stories with my spelling words when I struggled with reading and writing. As I catalogue each journal I'll be sharing an excerpt in hopes of creating a short story or poem that features a little from each. I’ll be working with themes of nostalgia, memory, the passage of time, identity and childhood.

This excerpt is from Volume II of my 2nd grade spelling words and stories composition book. My favorite story that I wrote is: The Lions From Space.
“On Sunday lions from outer space began to land in my backyard. The lions had telephones for ears and shoelaces for eyelids. It was February and only zero degrees outside. I’ll never forget that Sunday. Sometimes I think it’s all just a strange dream I had, and aliens never really landed in my backyard. My sister said she’s sure it wasn’t a dream. The lions began to say hello to me and my sister. We haven’t told anyone yet. I just want to keep it to myself, until I’m sure it wasn’t a dream.”

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I call this my 2001 Space Odessey. As a kid I was pretty into aliens, space, science experiments, hanging out with my cousins, the TV show As Told By Ginger, What’s Her Face dolls etc.  I was such a documentarian as a kid and I love how I can look back on my little life through these journals. My spelling errors are just too funny. I loved signing off my journal entries with the classic “So I must be going to bed. Bye see you next time.” Around this time I wrote my first script: Adventures In Space and had my family (sister, parents and cousins) star in it.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts: “Well first we did some crafts then we made shops. Me and Johnny were together and Catie & Jessie were together. Me and Johnny’s shop was called Happy Holiday Cards and Toys. I made a coloring book and three cards. It was really fun.”
“Catie and Jessies shop was also a CD shop, but they also had a turtle section. We did a lot of stuf but I can’t tell you because I have to go so bye. See you next time.”

In another entry I wrote about rounding a corner on my bike and ripping my new pants and crying. I vividly remember this. Those pants were the bomb. I also love the little section at the end of this journal where my sister high jacked it to reveal her crush, which i’ve omitted for anonymity. I remember my sister’s zebra picture frame. We used to go to the dollar store all the time, I usually got my journals there.

Check out my current science experiment. Some things stay the same and will never change.

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This journal is from 2002. It is covered in Highlight Magazine stickers, and glow in the dark stars and filled with many spelling errors. This has some of my favorite excerpts. I have vivid memories of playing this game “Ship and Shark”. “When they were over we played Ship & Shark. We played it like this, we (pretended) to be on a ship. Anyway there was a (pretend) shark on the ground, and we were trying to kill it.”

Another one of my favorite excerpts is: “I have some sad news today me and my mom, dad and sister went bike riding and when we were riding bikes, I was going around a parked bus and I slid and fell and ripped my new pair of pants that I got the day before. I was so sad and mad I started to cry. But I was alright. Once we got home we went to walmart to get stuff at the store.”

Childhood summers held some of my favorite memories. That summer I had a Hawaiian Luau themed birthday party. I was absolutely obsessed with Lelo & Stitch around this time. We listed to the soundtrack all night.

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As I go deeper with cataloging my journals, I’ve been exploring the topic of nostalgia. It’s pretty wild how much I documented my life since 2nd grade. These journals really hold my past and are somewhat of a timeline of my little life. It’s at the core of my identity.

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I came across NPR’s Throughline story: The Nostalgia Bone which lines up perfectly with the themes of my latest piece: STORY. Nostalgia acts as an escape. It is a longing for a home in the past. There has been a nostalgia boom after every traumatic event or crisis because it can help you weather the crisis. It might be imagined. It might be cobbled together. It might be even distorted. It doesn't mean that it's true or false, it just means that it might be kind of imperfect because memory sometimes is imperfect.

“The global pandemic has spawned a different type of epidemic, one of an entirely different nature: a nostalgia outbreak. Longing for 'simpler times' and 'better days', many of us have been turning to 90s dance playlists, TV sitcoms, and sports highlights. We're looking for comfort and safety in the permanence of the past, or at least, what we think the past was. But, when it first appeared, nostalgia itself wasn't considered a feeling; it was a deadly disease. This episode traces the history of nostalgia from its origins as an illness to the dominating emotion of our time. And in doing so, we wrestle with its eternal paradox to both hold us back and keep us going.”
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/13/1045812865/the-nostalgia-bone

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I’m realizing just how meticulous I was and still am about documenting my life. When I traveled with my family as a kid I was even more thorough about writing about the novelty and nuance of each new moment, everything was an adventure. This is my Vacation Journal volume I from 2002. My poppy’s girlfriend at the time gave us these cool glow in the dark pieces that I hot glued onto my journal. I particularly like my detailed list of animals that we saw in the Poconos and my drawings of myself, Jessie, Mom, Dad, Grandmom, Poppy, and Jeannie. These little memories are so charming and wholesome and make me feel so warm with childhood nostalgia.

Here are some of my favorite snippets: (I edited this so it was legible but the original cut with the spelling errors are hilarious)

“Once we came back to shore we left and went to the swimming area of the lake where Jeannie, Poppy, and Jessie, and me had a giant water fight with the water pistols. It was very fun. And me and Jessie were buried, I was a hula girl and Jessie was a mermaid and we took a picture with every bury. Then we went to the pool for a very long time where Jeannie taught us “water ballet” she taught us to do everything and we swam too. I love the water. After that we came home and made dinner. Tonight was Texas/USA barbecuing… the food was awesome! And of course Poppy was talking a whole lot. After that we watched “mouse hunt”.”

“When we were riding, Sam Mommy’s horse went to the bathroom and snorted and Jessie said “just like my dad” everybody laughed even my dad. Ha ha ha.”

“After I was in they called “adult swim”. Jessie was crying because she didn’t get to get in.”

“When we were walking Caleb outside we saw 5 wild turkeys. It was so cool. After we saw the turkeys we went fishing. We didn’t catch any fish but we found tiny baby fish that were on the ground and we saved them, but we had to put them back in the water.”

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This journal is from 2003, I was really into the book: Ella Enchanted. I particularly like this little ad I dropped in between pages of my story (The Princess and The Beggar) where I daydream about how cool it would be to have a canopy. “You can enjoy peaceful reading or a movie marathon in your bedroom with a cold drink.” I go on to sketch out different characters.

The journal ends with another attempt at another story. This one is called: The Necklace of Power!

“At this time she was being adventurous as all girls are. One time she even fought a dragon in the valley of Rodeeny. She didn’t really fight. She was trying to see if it liked Fruit Smashed Pie. The people of Lingsway said it was hard as a rock. She didn’t get hurt but ended up being close friends with the dragon. His name was Loxey The Dragon.”

I also found my movie script folder for Adventures in Space. My cousins and I were so creative at this age, we made our own movies and put on our own production of American Idol. We pretended my cousin was Johnny was Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day.

Enjoy the last image, it's my bizarre rendition of Animorphs.

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In 2003 I wrote my first script: Adventures In Space and had my family (sister, parents, and cousins) star in it. This is my Lisa Frank binder that lost it’s cover and back. Only the spine remains. The main character of my first film was myself, of course, and her name with Grechen Spenel.

“Hi I’m Grechen Spenel! I starred in the movie Adventures In Space. Hope you see all the episodes. It’s really funny. Here at the bottom is stuff about me. All about me. I like funny books. My favorite subject in school is Algebra. I have a cat named Spimpel and a goldfish named Spacey. I love them very much. I also have a mom dad and baby sister.”

Also around this time my sister and I created our own magazine: The Pony Express that we distributed to friends and family via copies from Staples. We were ambitious little kids. My sister and I have been pen-paling since she moved to Canada and call our correspondence The Pony Express and reminisce about old toys and memories of being a kid.

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This journal is from 2003 when I dabbled in writing songs, played the violin, and made lists to make the world a better place. I went to AWANA which was girl scouts for Christians. We got prizes for memorizing bible verses. Rereading these #6 and #8 stood out to me:

#6 write a book

#8 memorize more bible verses for when the devil attacks

Also around this time my best friend and I came up with the ABCs of friendship and penned our own secret language in gel pens.

Alongside this project, I’ve been reading The Courage To Create by Rollo May.

“Recall how often in human history the saint and the rebel have been the same person.”

“Intimacy requires courage because the risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The one thing we can be certain of is that if we let ourselves fully into the relationship for good or evil, we will not come out unaffected.”

“I’m just a collection of mirrors, reflecting what everyone else expects of me.”

“The awareness of death, however, can add vitality to life by motivating a person as much out of life as possible in the limited time available.”

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This excerpt is from 2004 when my mom, sister, and I created: The Fridge, a short story based on a silly question: Have you ever wondered what happens when you shut the refrigerator door? Here is the first draft in my mom’s almost illegible cursive.

A few years ago I collaborated with my sister to create an illustrated kid’s book version of this book. Check it out, in full, in the next post!

As I catalog each journal I'll be sharing an excerpt in hopes of creating a short story or poem that features a little from each. I’ll be working with themes of nostalgia, memory, the passage of time, identity, and childhood.

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This journal is from August 2005. It starts off with a camping trip I took with my mom, sister and cousin to Maryland. I took bulleted notes of our trip.

“Car trip about 1 hour and a half”

“During it someone threw a shoe or something at our car/green SUV”

“Piece of wood was jammed into the car's light! Weird!!”

“We brang T.V./ Torrential Vehicling which we are not supposed to have, also PlayStation 2” (sidenote: For some reason, we gave our TV a secret nickname so people didn’t know we brought it)

“Take pictures/ lose camera”

“Fact- pool is very warm!”

“Joey talked in his sleep but he didn’t fall off his bed”

I recently visited my aunts and we looked at pictures from the trip.

The journal continues through the seasons where I share my detailed Christmas lists.

National Treasure

Scrapbooking stuff

Stuff for room

The journal ends with me sharing about my medical trauma and the phrase. “God must have a plan for me.”

Around this time I was listening to a lot of Kirk Franklin and Switchfoot. I recently came across an article: Listening to Religious Music and Mental Health in Later Life. “Findings suggest that the frequency of listening to religious music is associated with a decrease in death anxiety and increases in life satisfaction, self-esteem, and a sense of control across the 2 waves of data. In addition, the frequency of listening to gospel music is associated with a decrease in death anxiety and an increase in a sense of control.”

This gets at the topic I’ve been diving into Resiliency in which spirituality acts as a buffer for life’s trauma.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24737625/#:~:text=Results%3A%20Findings%20suggest%20that%20the,the%202%20waves%20of%20data.

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I found my diary from 2005 when I was recovering from back surgery and heart surgery at 13 years old. I was a Christian kid, grew up in the church, loved switchfoot, and wrote meticulous Christmas lists. During those formative years, writing was such an important tool for me to: talk myself out of sadness and make gratitude lists because I was feeling like an outcast from surgeries. Reading this decades later, I’m finding some consistencies or throughlines, things about my identity that have stayed consistent and things that were authentically age-appropriate, time-capsuled, and shifted as I grew up.

The section that stood out to me is: “I don’t have to wear a brace anymore. I am not dying in a hospital bed. I am not in the hospital anymore. I can wear more types of clothes/ no more brace wear. I can go to school soon. I am getting better/ stitches healing up. I have seen a lot of great movies. I have lots of money to spend”.

At first, I was sad to re-read this, but then I realized that even at 13 I had some great coping tools to get myself out of some challenging spots. Resiliency.

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In 4th grade, my best friend in elementary school and I wrote our first children’s book! Her mom was the librarian at our school and my mom was the first-grade teacher. We had high hopes for this little story and could see it in the school’s library. We were very creative kids. It was called Hammy and Peewee’s Adventures and was about Ben and Cindy who had a pet hamster who escaped and met a mouse.

“Once in a small house in Greenville there lived a happy family with a mother, father, and two kids. The oldest one was a girl named Cindy and her little brother named Ben. They fought almost every second of the day. But one November day they had something else on their minds. They wanted a pet.”

I have such fond memories of visiting pet stores as a kid. I would spend hours looking at animals as a kid. I recently got a new little creature who will be the star of my December film. Stay tuned!