I get a little (?) overwhelmed now and then, and my handy-dandy Bullet Journal is THE best way I have to help with that feeling.

There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are at least a hundred ways to get the chaos out of your head and onto the page. Recently, I used the messiest mind map:

Photo of a hand drawn mind map: tiny stick figure drawn in red ink, surrounded by randomly sized/distributed "balloons", each with a small note in it (like "B bday" and "TX").
It probably says something psychological about how the “me” stick figure in the middle is TINYYYYY.

How do you make a mind map?

It’s pretty easy. Something goes in the middle, and other things float around it in boxes or circles.

Okay, that’s not a great definition. Wikipedia put it better: “A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information.

  • “A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole. 
  • “It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added.
  • “Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas.”

(I added the bullet points. Because, bullet points!)

So you can see that I have the basic idea, but I don’t bother much with hierarchy or images. And the central concept here is, simply, me.

Simplicity itself

I did a web search for “mind map”. Just like my Bullet Journal, my map looks nothing at all like the images of maps I found online. And as always, that’s fine. My map is simply meant to record the chaos that’s swirling around me…I don’t need it to be presentable in any way.

I’m sticking with that philosophy, even though I’m actually presenting my mind map to you. Nope! Still refuse to make it pretty. My mind, however, is somewhat calmer, so objective achieved!