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Growing up, I was a very crafty kid. You could always find me at the kitchen table drawing, felting and making jewelry. I even painted the walls of my wooden dollhouse.

But as I got older, I felt pressure to give up these hobbies for "more serious" activities. I gradually shifted my creativity into writing and playing the cello.

The perfectionist in me struggled to give myself permission to make art for fun. If I dedicated a lot of time and energy to making something and it turned out objectively bad, what was the point of doing it at all?

Fast forward to my senior year of college. I took a publishing class and our final project was to make a collection of literary work and design a cover for it.

I was struggling to use the digital program to create cover art, and the end of the semester was nearing. One day after class, I emptied the contents of a small trinket box I never unpacked — a few foreign coins, a magnet, a fortune cookie fortune — onto my desk, which had a brochure from the Minnesota Orchestra on it.

Carley Swanson-Garro / Bemidji Pioneer

I started rearranging the items, liking the 3D effect they had on the cover. I picked up the brochure and thumbed through it, finding a bunch of cool illustrations and fonts.

I was transported back to making collages on pieces of poster board in elementary school art class. Those early projects had felt overwhelming due to the huge white space I needed to fill up, but by using a magazine cover as the background, I had some guidance.

After collecting more items from around my room and the common space in my college house, I taped them down and scanned the finished collage into my phone.

After I graduated, my mom gave me and my long-distance boyfriend two identical notebooks and I thought about making collages in mine.

Shortly after, I saw a video on Instagram of a girl and her partner exchanging journals every time they saw each other. They were writing love notes and creating a scrapbook of photos and mementos.

I told my boyfriend he could put whatever he wanted in the notebooks, but our entries quickly became a collaborative junk journal: a collection of receipts, tags, notes, programs, stamps, stickers, ribbons and doodles.

A junk journal is a cheaper, messier approach to scrapbooking where the pages are made up of free, found items.

One day I'm cutting my boyfriend's name out of letters from a bookmark I got at the library and the next I'm pressing a fallen leaf from a walk along Lake Bemidji.

Junk journaling is less about telling a story in a linear way and more about drawing from your environment to capture a feeling.

By using double-sided tape, I'm able to layer and move items around to create a collage. Sometimes I go back and add items or notes to a page my boyfriend or I already worked on, creating a collaborative space where we can communicate from afar.

This approach to journaling has helped me work through my perfectionism because the outcome is intentionally less polished than a traditional scrapbook.

Creating a junk journal also keeps me grounded. When I'm in an unfamiliar place, I search for unique items to add to it. Saving bits of cardboard or plastic packaging to cut up and make art from helps keep items out of the landfill.

Things that I used to consider trash have become pieces of the story of my life and a testament to me and my boyfriend's love for each other.