That’s Up My Aly originated as an Instagram account, a messy place where I documented my awkward life highlights in high school and college. It has evolved over time to showcase my hobbies and the things I love most…

Writing has always been my “thing”, it is where I go to relax, to compose my thoughts and understand the world. When I was a sophomore in high school our English teacher had a yearlong assignment where we would journal ten (10) pages a week – I laughed at her challenged – this was something I was already accomplishing in a single day! I had been writing pages of notes to myself as a daily means to occupy my mind through mundane classes since junior high, where I was no longer able to get away with reading while teachers lectured. It has never been easy for me to stay focused on someone speaking. The true challenge for me sophomore year was finding ten (10) pages of content to write about that I was comfortable risking someone skimming through. (The teacher would literally have the class stack their notebooks up once per week and she would count the number of pages used. What a waste of time!)

Ten years have passed since I was last in that classroom and I now feel as if I am drowning in the number of notebooks I have acquired and the pages I have filled. I use at least a dozen different notebooks in any given week, as that educational lesson had really just taught me an intense need to compartmentalize my mind beyond necessity. My lists are long, lengthy, and require an unnecessary attention to detail and form. Honestly, it’s a little bit exhausting.

All of this has brought me a blessing of more than a decade worth of my recorded life, habits I have learned to be happy, all of its harsh lessons, and stories that fill me with joy. I love to go back through and see everything I have learned and gone through over time. I have decided it was due time to open shop on a blog website so that I would finally have a central location to organize, search, and categorize my thoughts for future use.

I hope you enjoy these little highlights of my story, thank you for being here!

xo Aly

Kindest thanks to Wildly Diera for providing me with my username inspiration.