Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have long been encouraged to keep journals. Keeping a personal history is sometimes compared to ancient scripture, and that we are leaving a spiritual record for our posterity by keeping a journal.

This Jasmine diary is my first-ever journal and mostly houses complaints about my siblings and friends.

The following 20 years of journals I kept were simililary handwritten, but became more emotionally complex and spiritually anchored.

My friends and I wrote on our own metal plates at a regional church youth activity. The idea was to imagine we were like Moroni and Mormon and other writers in the Book of Mormon who are believed to have engraven “reformed Egyptian” stories about their time on gold and brass plates.