Clarissa Tan

People say that college is the best four years of your life.

While I do feel like my Yale experience has so far been a utopian dream, I hope that for our sake, that statement isn’t true — as I’d like to think everything will not go downhill after May 2026. 

But it was on this premise that, when I first got to Yale, my mom gifted me a journal. She said Yale is a unique opportunity not many students get to experience, and that while I’m here, I was going to meet “cool awesome” people and partake in life-changing events. She encouraged me to write about it as documentation for my older self. 

My journal — a beige, made in Japan, 187-page 195 x 137-mm MUJI pocket note — is plain. When I first started writing, I found the blank pages intimidating. I’d never really been much of a “writer” — I still don’t consider myself one today — and I much preferred art as a visual language. Throughout my first semester, I set a daily alarm for 11:30 p.m., reminding myself to journal. I even bought a pack of colorful MUJI pens to encourage myself to write.

Now three years into Yale, my journal is bent, beat up, ripped in a million places and covered in an amalgamation of clear tape and blue masking tape to precariously hold the pages together. For someone who is meticulously organized — think color-coded G-cal — my journal is a complete mess. There is no distinction between my travel stories, doodles for tattoo ideas, illustrations of my classmates, Yale events, tea dumps, country ratings or random math equations from exam practice. The only thing that consistently separates my words are the headings, which I format “[WEEKDAY] [MONTH] [DAY]”. 

And yet, I’m surprisingly unbothered by this chaos. There is no system of thoughts, no pressure to sanitize my emotions and no outside eye to critique my incoherence. Whenever something “interesting” crops up in my day, my first instinct is to journal about it. My entries vary in length: anywhere from two sentences to two pages, depending on the importance of the event and how dramatic I’m feeling at any given moment. 

Once a year, usually when I’m on a transcontinental flight, I go through my journal and read the previous entries. It’s like being in a time machine. I squint my eyes at MON 7/3, when I accidentally became so drunk off of Aperol Spritz while studying abroad in Paris, that my handwriting was completely indiscernible. I say a blessing at THURS 8/10, when I survived nearly drowning in Porto with a girl I had met that morning from London. I cringe at SAT 10/15, when I thought I had just met the love of my life at a Yale frat. 

I’m almost out of room, but not quite. I’m about two-thirds through, and I’m really hoping that I have enough pages to last through graduation. As it stands, this journal is a collection of everything important, interesting, exciting or noteworthy to me from the past three (soon to be four) years — the good and the bad — and supposedly, the best of my life.