I buy notebooks like other people buy lottery tickets. Full of hope. Certain that this one will be different.
The first page is always perfect. Neat handwriting. A date in the top corner. Sometimes a title, underlined. I’m organized. I’m a writer. This is where the magic happens.
By page four the handwriting is worse. By page eight I’m skipping lines. By page twelve I’ve written a grocery list in the margin and the notebook goes in the drawer with the others.
I counted once. Fourteen notebooks. All of them barely started. All of them with that same hopeful first page.
My friend told me to go digital. “You can’t abandon a Google Doc,” she said. She was wrong. I have forty-seven untitled documents in my Drive. Same energy, no physical evidence.
The thing is, I don’t think the problem is the notebooks. The problem is that I love beginnings. The blank page is my favorite page. Everything is possible on a blank page. Nothing has gone wrong yet. No awkward sentences, no dead-end paragraphs, no moments where I realize I don’t actually know what I’m trying to say.
Finishing is the hard part. Finishing means deciding that the messy version is the version. That the thing you made is the thing, not the perfect thing you imagined when you opened to page one.
I’m working on it. This blog is me working on it. Every post I publish is a tiny victory over the drawer.
Sorry, notebooks. It was never about you.