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Collected Item: “2020 Planner”

Give your story a title.

2020 Planner

What sort of object is this: text story, photograph, video, audio interview, screenshot, drawing, meme, etc.?

photograph of a journal with the title "Keep It Together"

Tell us a story; share your experience. Describe what the object or story you've uploaded says about the pandemic, and/or why what you've submitted is important to you.

This bullet journal, titled "Keep It Together," was created fresh after moving states in January of 2020. January through February are well organized, with the planner I drew out having individual days, and places for grocery lists, to-do lists and monthly goals. Even March keeps the same energy, stretching into the beginning of the pandemic, but April comes with a great shift. What was once a detailed planner has lost any sense of time, becoming an amalgamation of grocery lists for vague weeks, stream-of-consciousness poetry, and abandoned bullet lists of brainstorming what to do with my life...only for the journal to snap back into focus at the end of July, continuing its main function as a planner, what with less frills than before. This mirrors my own experience in 2020, as April-July was the period of time I spent alone, living in a new city, working at a fast food job that did not stop when the rest of the world did. I felt very much like my journal, unmoored and adrift, until a change in job and living situation and deciding to go back to school helped bring me some sense of purpose again.

Use one-word hashtags (separated by commas) to describe your story. For example: Where did it originate? How does this object make you feel? How does this object relate to the pandemic?

journal, planner, lockdown, alone,

Who originally created this object? (If you created this object, such as photo, then put "self" here.)

self

Give this story a date.

2020-04
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