Your Ordinary Life Is Worth Keeping
From TV binges to dinner on repeat, the everyday moments are worth keeping.
Hi friends, One of the most common things I hear is: “But my life is too boring to document.”
Here’s the truth: normal isn’t boring. Average isn’t boring. Similar isn’t boring. If your story feels flat, it usually just means it’s not finished yet—or you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. Your story, right now, is the accumulation of a thousand small moments. And those small moments? They’re the good stuff.
Here’s what we’ll cover in this email:
Why “daily” doesn’t mean perfection
How my own routine bends with life
Ways you can choose your own rhythm
Why We Dismiss the Everyday
So why do we throw away our daily details like they don’t matter?
Part of it is the world we live in. Social media feeds us a steady stream of highlight reels—vacations, weddings, viral clips. It’s easy to think everyone else is living a blockbuster life while we’re just over here unloading the dishwasher again.
And if you don’t see lives like yours reflected in the media? If you’re a woman, or part of a marginalized group? That makes it even harder. When your real story doesn’t line up with the stories on your feed, you start to doubt whether yours counts.
But here’s the thing: the highlight reel isn’t the whole story. Your everyday life is where the meaning actually lives.
Your Turn: What’s one small totally normal thing you did today that someone scrolling your feed would never see?
How Ordinary Adds Up
The small things matter because they stack. Day by day, season by season, they build into something bigger.
Your garden photos become a story of growth.
Your book list shows your curiosity changing.
Your TV log becomes a time capsule of comfort shows and new obsessions.
I love using my Currently List for this. Every Monday I write down seven little -ing words—watching, reading, making, loving. In the moment, it feels super basic, like scribbling notes on a napkin. But when I flip back through a season of lists, I can see myself. What I was into. What I was struggling through. What I kept coming back to.
That’s the magic of the ordinary: it feels small now, but over time it turns into treasure.
Your Turn: Write your own Currently List this week. What’s on repeat in your life right now?
My Ordinary Stories
Here’s one of my favorite examples: Thursday3. Every Thursday for the last 15 years, I’ve taken a selfie and written down three things about my right-now life. It started in college when I wanted more photos of myself before graduating. Over the years, it turned into a ritual, and now it’s a page I do in my Daily Pages notebook pretty often.
Some weeks its fun and silly. Some weeks I look tired. During my worst headache years, it was sometimes the only documenting I could manage. Looking back at those photos and pages now, I can see my progress—the way my face softened, the way my words shifted as I slowly started to heal. I never would have noticed that in real time.
And then there are my Currently Lists like I mentioned above. They’re full of food, plants, and whatever I’m watching on TV. Do they feel important while I’m writing them? Not at all. But later, they’re a time machine. They tell me who I was in those in-between seasons, not just at the big milestones.
These are the “boring” pages I love most.
Your Turn: Make a list of the ordinary things you’re living with right now—food, music, weather, random errands. That’s your story too.
Daily Pages Are Built for This
This is why I’m obsessed with Daily Pages. When you show up consistently, you naturally create room for the little stories. You’ve already written about the big stuff, so the everyday details finally get their own spotlight.
Daily Pages are quick, simple, and low-pressure. That makes them the perfect home for documenting ordinary life.
Most days, I give myself a solid 20 minutes to create. Sometimes I keep it simple: a picture, a few words, maybe some color. Other times, I add a sticker, do some stamping, gel printing, or add a bit of ephemera. I’ll add in some journaling about the basics: A note about dinner. A screenshot of the weather. A doodle.
Do I fight the urge to complicate things? All the time. My brain loves a challenge. But I’ve trained myself to stop and ask: Does this actually need more? Or am I just overthinking because it came together too easily?
Letting go of the idea that “simple = boring” has been huge. Simple is honest. Simple is fast. Simple gets the story down.
And routines like Currently and Thursday3 make it even easier. They give me a ready-made structure to work inside. Instead of starting from scratch, I can play with iteration—what’s different this week, what stays the same. And because other people do these challenges too, I get inspiration and connection without reinventing the wheel.
A Feminist Act
Here’s the part that gets me fired up: documenting your life is feminist resistance.
The world loves to tell women and marginalized folks that our stories only matter if they look a certain way. Perfect. Polished. Marketable. Otherwise? Not worth it.
Choosing to say my life counts is a refusal of that. It’s standing up and saying: this story matters because it’s mine.
And it doesn’t have to be a “big win.” I don’t need my life to be a string of achievements to make it worth remembering. I want to know about the snacks I ate while binging TV, the plants I nurtured in my backyard, the books I underlined until the margins were full. That’s how I relate to myself. That’s how I connect with others.
When you honor your everyday life, you create space for others to honor theirs too. Your story makes room for someone else’s.
There’s no such thing as a boring story.
Your days aren’t just the highlight reel. They’re the meals, the errands, the TV binges, the football Sundays, the late-night doodles. They’re the ordinary things that quietly build into a life.
And when you keep those stories, you give yourself the gift of looking back and saying: That was me. That was real. That mattered.
Here’s what we covered today:
Ordinary stories are never boring—they just need time and perspective
Simple routines like Currently Lists and Thursday3 turn small details into treasures
Documenting your everyday life is a powerful way to say my story matters
Action Step: Document one ordinary thing this week. Your desk, your dinner, your favorite mug. See how it feels to call that a story.
Talk to you next week!
xoxo,
Kristin
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