From the 2021 Archives: Reflections on notebook keeping

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearranges of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss. — Joan Didion, „On Keeping a Notebook“

I am a mess. Especially when it comes to writing. I wish I could say that I have a proper writing routine, one in which I get up early every day to write a few pages before I have to sacrifice the rest of my day to make a living. I don’t. That’s why I usually get uncomfortable when people ask me about my writing habits, specifically my notebooks. To be clear, that’s not their fault. It is my insecurity powered by my perfectionism that makes me feel like I am doing a lousy job at writing and keeping my notebooks (yes, I am a Virgo, in case you’re wondering). But the truth is, and it has taken me until my mid-twenties to realize that, there’s no right way of writing and no proper way of keeping a notebook. There’s just your way.

I feel like I have to preface this text by acknowledging this because some of the most frequent questions I get on Instagram are variations of the following: What do you write in your notebooks? How do you structure them? How often do you write in your notebooks? Do you have different journals for different subjects? And I get it. There is an undeniable aura of secrecy to a tattered notebook that doesn’t belong to you – a forbidden lure emanating from its dog-eared pages. The notebooks of others always seemed a bit heavier, as if they carried more meaning than our own. Maybe that’s why we are so curious about them?

I am also familiar with these questions because, for the longest time, I was the one asking them. Obsessing about them. Did others put a date? A place? Were they writing in full sentences, or were they just noting down bullet points? Did bullet journaling actually work for them? What were subjects deemed worthy of writing down? What’s the right journal? The right pen? A right time to write? Times that should be avoided? Instead of writing and discovering what works for me, I was preoccupied with figuring out how to do it “right.“

The Notebooks of Others

Back when I was doing my undergraduate degree, I spent hours watching other people on Youtube flip through their journals, finding inspiration in their artistic handwriting and sometimes incredible artwork. I got the journals of Susan Sontag at the local library and spend a few nights shamefully intruding into the mind of my then role model. And just like that, the towering figure of the brilliant writer disenchanted herself. Here was the woman who wrote about photography in a way that shifted my understanding of the medium entirely, talking about needing a mental gym, writing lists of books she wanted to read, noting down lunch dates and other banalities as if she was merely human. Of course, Sontag also famously wrote:

“In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”

And it is this understanding of notebook keeping that resonates most with me: Journaling as a kind of self-fashioning, a trying on of different, even contradictory versions of oneself, without fear of judgment because notebooks — as artistic as they can be — in contrast to art, do not demand a witness. In fact, they require the opposite. They are private spaces that belong to the keeper alone. They allow her to meet the many different and ever-changing versions of herself without conforming to social expectations. Or at least, ideally, they would.

Orbiting around yourself

It took me until my late twenties to understand that the empty page was an invitation to explore my thoughts, feelings, and experiences completely untethered from social or other conventions. When I look at some of my first notebooks (I was probably eight or nine years old), they are filled with stickers to cover spelling mistakes – something I was too embarrassed by. They were also attempts at perfection, a performance that lacked authenticity — a practice of self-policing. When I read them now, I see a girl, who tried to fit some unattainable norm so desperately, she flattened her creativity and other parts of herself to fit in. That also explains why there have been years in which I’ve entirely abandoned notebooks. After all, there’s no joy in keeping a notebook for somebody else – it’s something you do for yourself — a deeply selfish pleasure in the best way possible.

Here’s to leaning a bit more into this kind of self-indulgence in 2021.