There’s an ongoing joke in the journal, writing, and planner communities that the perfect notebook—the right planner, the ideal system, the whole carefully curated ecosystem—will solve all of our problems.
And honestly? I’m a firm believer that this is completely accurate.
I have a bookshelf full of notebooks. Some are completely filled. Some are half-finished. Some were started, abandoned, and later returned to—pages ripped out along the way. And some are still sitting there in their original plastic wrap, untouched and full of promise.
There’s something about a fresh piece of paper that opens up an entire world of possibilities. It gives us a place to express ourselves, to work through the thoughts, ideas, and opinions constantly noodling around in our heads. It’s a space where we’re allowed to be free. There are very few places in the world that feel like that anymore.
I wrote my first short story in third grade. I’m fairly certain it was ripped off from a TV show (I can’t tell you which one, so maybe it’s fine?). I remember there was a diner involved, and people were trapped because the bridge was out. Beyond that, the details are fuzzy. What I do remember is sitting at the kitchen table, writing it out by hand—my eight-year-old handwriting oversized and uneven, with more spelling mistakes than correctly spelled words.
I wrote it in blue pen, because even then, writing in pen felt more official. Pencil was childish. Pencil meant you could erase your mistakes—when sometimes your mistakes were the best thing you’d written.
After that, I filled notebook after notebook. The ones bought for school were quietly repurposed for creativity. Margins were packed with story ideas, character names, and half-formed plots. Sometimes there were full character profiles. Side note: if someone wanted to pay me just to develop fictional characters, I would be the happiest person alive.
The summer I turned fifteen was when I wrote in my first official journal. I’d had others before, but they never lasted. Most were thrown away along with the rest of my childhood clutter. At fifteen, though, I committed.
That journal became my safe space. It was where I would go to work through depression and anxiety—both of which ran deep and loud. I wrote out conversations I wished I’d had with friends and family. I worked out the things I wanted to say but couldn’t get my brain and voice to connect. It was where standing up for myself might have gone, if I’d known how to do it then.
That was 30 years ago.
When I look at notebooks now, I still feel that same sense of freedom. I still feel that sense of relief having a place to write down all the ideas, thoughts, worries, and dreams. Even with decades of filled pages and shelves crowded with notebooks, I still believe in the possibilities provided by a new notebook and a blank page. It gives me a place to store everything - The mess. The questions. The things that feel too big to hold in my head alone. I still believe that everything can be changed with the right notebook. It does so quietly and steadily, giving shape to what would otherwise spill everywhere, rather than in a grand, cinematic sense.
A blank page still provides us with space to be unfinished in a world that rarely does.
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