You know that thing where you go and have a secret, sneaky, unexpected feeling about something you never intended to have a fucking feeling about? Yeah. That thing is happening. That thing is happening kind of a lot lately, maybe a little too much.

This is what I’m having a feeling about today. And I don’t think I ever showed you the finished version, so it seemed like the thing to do.*

I started this in early January. There was a picture on a wall in my house that needed to come down for Feelings Management Reasons. But having that spot empty was very nearly worse than having the banned picture there, so I needed something else in that spot. But I didn’t have anything I could put there, and finding something big enough to fill the space felt hard and expensive and time consuming, and I needed it fixed fast and preferably cheap. So I decided to make something.

I had giant paper. I had an iron. I had a sewing machine and grommets and cording. And I had lots and lots of little bits of things that I always wanted to put up somewhere but never quite got around to. So I spent an afternoon making a big…folded…pocket…thing. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to show that the idea was solid. I spent inauguration day, a day that required careful feelings management if ever there was one, working on version two. Which was significantly better, but still not quite done. A little while later I made version three, which is what you see here. It’s been hanging on my wall, with occasional tweaks, since early March.

I see it every day, and every day it reminds me of all sorts of things. (No, it does not normally hang on my card catalog, but that was the easiest way to take a picture of it I was ok sharing, so I stuck it there briefly today to take photos, it’s going back on the wall shortly.)

And here’s where the god damn feelings bit comes in. Because as I was rearranging things to take these pictures, I realized that each and every one those little bits and pieces could be the start of a story about something that’s happened in my life in the five months this thing has been on my wall. Yes even though many of them are things I’ve had shoved in the back of various closets for years. Digging them out and putting them somewhere I can see them feels like it woke them up. And mixing them together with things I’ve made with friends and things that came in the mail and things I found while I was out adventuring feels like it’s created some sort of magical amalgam of past me and now me and the future me I’m working on becoming.

Which is not what I was expecting when I sat down with a giant sheet of blank paper, desperate to make something, anything, to distract myself from the unbearable blank space where an old picture used to be. But it happened anyway. And that’s pretty nifty (and ties rather nicely into the idea that paper is magic, which seems to be a running theme for me just lately).

So here’s a vote for making something like this for yourself (it’s literally just a long piece of paper, folded up to make pockets and then sewn down to hold those pockets in place). Or if you don’t want to do that, find some other way to collect the little bits and pieces that mean something to you all in one place and put them somewhere you’ll see them often. Because I bet that might be magic for you in the same way this has been magic for me. Even if it doesn’t make any sense. Even if you can’t explain why. Even if it inadvertently gives you a god damn feeling.

* I post so much stuff on instagram these days because it’s easy to flip on the camera and talk to the phone for a minute, but then it’s impossible to find things later, so I’m trying to at least replicate a version of it on the blog. Because the blog is mine, and the blog is where I’ve been tracking at least parts of my life for the last 16 years, and I don’t want that to stop (and I don’t trust any sort of social media platform to last forever).

So, for the convenience of the recording angel and/or future me and/or anyone interested in this project, I think the first post about it is from inaguration day. And when I posted that, I already had version one (a two row style) done and spent the day working on version two. Then I posted in early March about how version two came out and a few days later about how I was starting on version three. Version three is the one that’s been on my wall ever since, and I posted about it on insta around then, though I don’t think I fully shared it here until today.