I received a medium-sized, turquoise-colored, leather-covered notebook for a birthday some number of years ago. I never wrote in it. In fact, I tucked it away in some drawer for a couple of years and forgot about it entirely, until I did a massive cleanout of my entire room. It seemed a waste to throw it out – be environmentally friendly, right?
So at the beginning of my junior year of high school, I tentatively put a pen to the paper and started to fill the pages. Reminders, quotes, doodles – I didn’t really care what I put in the notebook; I was just determined to finish a notebook once and for all. I’d kept “diaries” during my childhood – summaries of my days in messy Korean handwriting with stick-figure doodles in the margins – but I’d always abandon them after a few months. (I still have two of them. God, I was such an annoyingly naïve kid. I still am.)
It took me nine months to fill that notebook from cover to cover – so, basically forever. But then I did the same thing with another, this time a smaller, brown, leather-bound notebook with no lines on the pages that looked like it belonged in the 1800s. Again, I filled it with passing thoughts, daily summaries, poetry, drawings, information. I’m on my third notebook in 15 months now: a smaller, gridded, plain Moleskine.
Keeping a notebook was the best thing I ever did for myself. It encourages productivity (I have pages and pages of to-do lists), provides therapy (I let loose my thoughts and opinions from time to time), and cultivates creativity (my doodles and ideas for poems find a home). I wouldn’t have been able to write most of my pieces without my notebooks – I’m prone to forgetting things (and more importantly, ideas!) if I don’t jot them down somewhere.
So here’s a collection of the slightly-less-private pages of my notebook – some that are growing or have grown into fully-fledged poems or mindmaps or essays, others that have a more therapeutic value, and still more that show a bit of my thought process.
So at the beginning of my junior year of high school, I tentatively put a pen to the paper and started to fill the pages. Reminders, quotes, doodles – I didn’t really care what I put in the notebook; I was just determined to finish a notebook once and for all. I’d kept “diaries” during my childhood – summaries of my days in messy Korean handwriting with stick-figure doodles in the margins – but I’d always abandon them after a few months. (I still have two of them. God, I was such an annoyingly naïve kid. I still am.)
It took me nine months to fill that notebook from cover to cover – so, basically forever. But then I did the same thing with another, this time a smaller, brown, leather-bound notebook with no lines on the pages that looked like it belonged in the 1800s. Again, I filled it with passing thoughts, daily summaries, poetry, drawings, information. I’m on my third notebook in 15 months now: a smaller, gridded, plain Moleskine.
Keeping a notebook was the best thing I ever did for myself. It encourages productivity (I have pages and pages of to-do lists), provides therapy (I let loose my thoughts and opinions from time to time), and cultivates creativity (my doodles and ideas for poems find a home). I wouldn’t have been able to write most of my pieces without my notebooks – I’m prone to forgetting things (and more importantly, ideas!) if I don’t jot them down somewhere.
So here’s a collection of the slightly-less-private pages of my notebook – some that are growing or have grown into fully-fledged poems or mindmaps or essays, others that have a more therapeutic value, and still more that show a bit of my thought process.