I have always had a drawer filled with notebooks.
If you flip through these notebooks, you will notice an oddity: They all have a few used pages, but the remaining pages are blank.
I am most careful on the first page when starting a new notebook. Every letter is upright. Every sentence fits neatly on the lines. If I draw a diagram, the circles are round, and the squares have sharp edges.
Once I get to page five, my handwriting shows early signs of messiness. Perhaps I’m tired. Maybe I only have seconds to jot down what someone said. Or I need to correct what I wrote.
The trend quickly worsens from there. When I reach page ten, my writing becomes unwieldy and unbearable. I hate that I cannot maintain neatness as I had it on page one.
Destructive thoughts surface at this point. I do one of two things: I either rip the used pages out and start over (which often causes the notebook to disintegrate and fall apart) or I head to the store and buy more new notebooks.
—
I opened my notebook drawer when I picked up journaling again in 2020 after a six-year break. I was perplexed as I went through dozens of partially used journals.
Who cares if the writing is neat? I don’t even read this.
On that day, I vowed to use every journal to its last page. I would never tear pages off again. If I didn’t like what I wrote, I would draw a horizontal line and restart underneath.
In August 2021, I completed a journal cover-to-cover for the first time. It might sound silly, but I felt triumphant.
What I wrote in that journal didn’t matter. What mattered was that I let go of an undesired obsession that had governed my life for as long as I could remember. Something in me had shifted.
I am now on my seventh journal.