I began writing for my own personal comfort by journaling, starting my Freshman year of college. I have always been someone who perceives the world more so through her emotions rather than through anything else. I also found that my head is always swimming with thoughts. I even have intense dreams most of the time, remembering from time to time very complex and intricate details when I wake up. My brain is always running, and when I’m feeling very emotional, I find it difficult to sort out my thoughts all on my own just by thinking through them. That’s why I chose to start keeping a journal.

Throughout most of my life I thought keeping a journal or a diary was strange, that it was only for angst-ridden teenagers. However, writing, even just to sort out one’s own thoughts is actually really good for your mind. It helps gather your thoughts, sort out your emotions, document memories and knowledge learned, and to even help you retain information that you have learned.

Once I began journaling, I saw the positive impact it had on my life. I was able to sort out my thoughts and emotions more clearly. I write when I’m feeling extremely emotional, and I found that it helps to calm me. For me, it’s almost like a form of meditation.

Once I saw the positive impact that it had on me and once I realized how much I enjoyed it, I began keeping a prayer journal. Since my mind is always swimming with thoughts, writing out my prayers helps me to keep from getting distracted by other thoughts or ideas floating around in my mind. Writing helps me to keep my focus on my time spent with God.

I also started journaling after I had read something that I either found extremely important, highly interesting, or grossly challenging. I started journaling about the reactions I had to literature. I started doing this after I’d read parts of the Bible, and I later started doing it with other books, too, because I saw how it helped me to gather my thoughts about what I had learned or maybe information that I didn’t understand.

At this point, I was keeping three separate journals, all for the three separate reasons that I had listed thus far. Keeping these three journals made me realize how much I enjoy writing and telling stories. Even though when I just began writing I was basically just telling stories to myself, I saw how much I enjoyed documenting my life and telling my story.

A year ago, I was severely depressed, lost, and confused about who I was and where I wanted to go in my life, that’s when I began writing poetry. Now, poetry has always been extremely difficult for me to understand, but I have always found immense pleasure in reading it. I also find poetry to be a wonderful mode of expressing oneself. Feelings and thoughts are not always clear, and with poetry, they don’t have to be. I found emotional relief through writing about my pain in the form of poetry. With poetry, I could write out my thoughts as they came. Poetry doesn’t always necessarily have to be clear to make sense, and poetry can come to have different meanings for whomever is reading it. I’ve always been someone who understands life better through symbols and analogies. Through poetry, I was able to use those things to talk about my pain without having to be direct about how I was feeling. I’m not a poetry expert, and I never plan to publish any of my poetry (at least not any time soon). However, I do enjoy it now, because it helps me to put my negative and positive emotions into an art form.

The last time I was in France, I kept a blog, mainly to keep my friends and family updated on what I was up to while I was studying abroad. However, I found that I loved sharing my little stories with the people I love. So, I decided to do it again the second time around and started this blog here. However, I wanted to do it differently.

I love travel blogs, because, well, I love traveling. I love learning about new travel tips and doing research on the places that I want to see and experience. However, there is an aspect about traveling that the majority of travel blogs don’t cover: the impact of cultural exchange on personal growth and on one’s shifted world perspective. This is the main part of traveling that I enjoy the most. I love learning about new cultures and meeting new people. I love learning about how people live differently than me, and I love how this helps me to grow as an individual and understand the world a little more. This is something that I want to capture when I write about my travel experiences, in addition to telling people about what I saw and did and about the new travel hacks that I learn along the way.

So, to summarize, I choose to write for many reasons. I choose to write because I have a story to tell, and I enjoy telling it. I will be honest. Traveling blogging is not a new thing. Writing poetry is not a new thing. Journaling is not a new thing. Blogging in general is not a new thing. I am not unique in any of these, however, I enjoy writing in all of these forms because I enjoy continuing to sort out my thoughts and ideas. I enjoy putting art out there, both for my enjoyment and for the potential enjoyment of others. I enjoy writing because of the possibility of helping someone else to realize their own story. I enjoy writing because of the possibility of inspiring someone else to tell their own story or of inspiring them to pursue their dreams and their goals.

I choose to write because it makes me understand the world and myself a little bit better.