I grew up doing arts and crafts. It was part of my world. My grandmother taught me to crochet. Counted cross stitch and quilling were popular with my friends. Every Christmas, I completed ornament kits. Fifty years later, I still put them on my tree.

As I move into retirement, I have made arts and crafts a priority. Over the past two years, I have helped create two monthly craft groups. Having a community of supportive crafters has provided motivation for trying new activities and honing my skills in others.

My daily creative work takes places in a hybrid planner/art journal that I have designed over the past year. It is a mash up of bullet-journal style monthly and weekly layouts along with junk journal and collage pages. For 2026, I am using single-month journals with brown covers and dotted pages: literal blank journals where I can design and create the layouts and tracking pages that work for me. I have included a couple examples.

I have learned a lot about styles and setups for these kinds of journals from various accounts on social media. I joined a couple of Facebook groups devoted to junk journaling specifically. They were full of helpful information and wonderful examples. But, there was a dark side as well. Group leaders felt the need to carefully define the practice. Commenters were not always as diplomatic as they might be. Posters began requesting that people be kind when they shared their efforts. General questions were often seen as critical rather than curious; users were directed to Google to learn more before they dared to engage. Commenters began arguing with each other over the content of their comments.

It is a little funny, really. At its core, junk journaling is about gluing stuff down. Margarete Miller, a crafting blogger, says there are no rules. I have no plans to share my journal with the Facebook groups as I am not interested in critique. I do this for me: it is creative and mindful and fun. I do share with my craft groups. We may do a bit of critiquing, but mostly we enjoy looking at what each of us has created. I get a kick out of looking at past journals myself, remembering where I was, what was going on, when I made any particular page.

Mostly, though, the group dynamics are sad. Many people never try arts or crafts because they don’t think they are artistic. Faced with a blank page and told to be creative, they are paralyzed by their inner critic. Junk journaling should be the perfect beginner practice to combat that fear, as you are, again, gluing stuff down. However, by creating some ideal way to glue stuff down and pressuring people into opening their work to potential public ridicule, these groups end up destroying any potential meditative impacts of the practice. In fact, they add to the anxiety that junk journaling was meant to help alleviate.

I was reminded of a clip from The West Wing that shows these kinds of hostile spaces have been part of the Internet almost since the beginning. The website referenced in the clip was real. Aaron Sorkin, who created and wrote the series, joined the group and almost immediately got into trouble with the message board denizens. As much as things change, people tend to stay the same.