I’ve Made a Collage Every Day for 235 Days. This Is What It Taught Me.
For the past 235 days, I’ve made a collage at the end of every single day.
Not for Instagram.
Not for anyone else.
Just for me.
I didn’t begin with a grand vision. There was no end goal, no creative challenge, no plan to turn it into something bigger.
I started because I felt lost.
My life had shifted in ways I never would have predicted. The future I had once pictured so clearly was no longer the one unfolding in front of me. I found myself suspended in a strange space between what I thought would happen and what actually did.
In some moments, I felt hopeful. In others, I found myself grieving the life I had imagined for myself.
I didn’t know what was next, and that uncertainty was deafening.
The Moments In Between
We’ve become so accustomed to measuring our lives in milestones. Graduation. A job. A promotion. Marriage. A house. A family. A Plan.
There’s comfort in these milestones. They give us direction. They give us something to point to when someone asks us, “What’s next?”
But what happens when you don’t know the answer?
For a while, that question made me feel small. It made me feel behind, especially as I watched others around me reach the milestones I once thought I would, too. I felt like I had somehow gone backwards, and it left me wondering if I was wasting time, if I was disappointing people, if I was disappointing myself.
For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have a clear milestone to chase. No obvious chapter beginning. Nothing steady to move toward.
I felt like I was floating.
Something Smaller
So one day, instead of trying to map out the next five years, I tried something smaller.
I decided that every single day, I would take photos of the things that made me happy, however small or seemingly insignificant. My morning coffee. Lighting a candle. Playing with Olive. Cooking dinner. A sunset. A walk with a loved one.
A quiet morning, sipping my cup of coffee before a busy day.
No day was too busy, too ordinary, or too hard.
Even on the days I felt overwhelmed with work, emotionally messy, or physically off, I would still pull out my phone and capture something. Not to post, not to prove anything. Just to take notice. I’ve realized that even on my lowest days, there is always something worth holding onto.
Some days are obviously joyful, holidays with family, a fancy dinner, travel, big celebrations. But those aren’t my favorite collages.
My favorites are the quiet ones. A soft morning sunrise. An evening snuggled up on the couch. Olive sniffing the brisk air out the car window.
Seeing the Bigger Picture
When I look back at 235 days of collages, I don’t see stagnancy. I don’t see someone without direction. I don’t see someone who is “behind.”
I see love. I see my home taking shape. I see someone who is trying new things. I see over a thousand small moments that, together, make up a life.
Zooming out allowed me to see the individual stitches, the routines and ordinary rituals that quietly carried me forward through a season of uncertainty. It helped me see who I was becoming and what I was building, even when in the moment it didn’t feel like much at all.
It made me realize something.
When you zoom out, the small things become the big things.
We’re always told, “You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.” Maybe that’s because we don’t fully appreciate what’s right in front of us, or because we assume it will always be there. We’re so busy sprinting toward what’s next that we overlook the very things shaping us along the way. We move so quickly that even the extraordinary starts to feel ordinary.
This practice slowed me down.
It helped me understand what actually matters to me. Not what looks impressive. Not what checks a societal box. Not what earns validation.
Just the quiet rhythms that make up my days.
Perhaps Ordinary is Extraordinary
On the nights when I feel like I’m not doing enough, I scroll through my album of collages.
It reminds me that I am living. That I am building something, even if I can’t yet name it. That I already have so much to be grateful for. The small things I love are not distractions from my life. They are my life.
I still don’t know exactly what the next milestone is, but I’m no longer panicking about it the way I used to. I trust that if I keep living in ways that make me proud, appreciating what I have and trying new things, life will carry me where I’m meant to go.
If 235 days have taught me anything, it’s this:
A life doesn’t become meaningful at a finish line. It becomes meaningful in the accumulation of ordinary, beautiful days.
So, “What’s Next?”
I still don’t have the answer. But I no longer feel the weight of being behind. I don’t measure myself against someone else’s timeline or rush toward something just because I think I should. Life doesn’t always unfold the way we plan it to.
And instead of feeling like a failure, I feel open. The world feels wide. I’m not locked into a single path. There are so many ways this life could unfold.
And for the first time in a long time, that feels exciting.
