By the time this first column goes to print, I will have forgotten all about it. In fact, I will be quite busy throwing myself a party to commemorate another momentous occasion: my first ever filled-up notebook. Gasp!

This thing has been weighing my purse (and my short stature) down since mid-February, when I first started religiously carrying my “Dot Grid Journal.” It’s black, with a place-marking ribbon and a band of lime green to keep it shut. Classic. Did I mention it has a grid of dots inside? Take that, college-ruled.

Anyways, let us examine the usual suspects that inhabit its navel-gazing depths. Notes. Observations. Journal entries. Lists of all varieties, including packing and gratitude. Doodles. Rants. Brilliant ideas. Stupid ones. Stickers, speech drafts, crayon sketches. Good quotes. And, um, a business plan involving mustaches.

Truly, it’s become as much of an extension of my arm as my iPhone has always been, whether I whip my notebook out to scribble an epiphany down in a parked car or dump the contents of my frazzled brain into bullet points during class to avoid nuclear meltdown.
The reason why this particular notebook is special needs some extremely precise, numerical context: I must confess to having at least a gazillion other notebooks lying around my room at this exact moment. I swear to you, I have over a dozen Moleskines (some were gifts!), seven Muji notebooks, and an extravagant amount of plain ring-bounds. Don’t judge – it was always with the best intentions.

You see, I’ve always wanted to be the diary-keeping kind of girl. From a young age, my theory has been that I would despise being 85 and not remembering squat about my life, so I figured I’d preempt old age and become a brilliant writer, all in one go. That latter thought is probably what paralyzed me and led to these billion-gajillion notebooks of all kinds rarely having more than three pages filled in before being tossed aside.

Even though I was “writing for myself,” I had this narcissistic thought floating around in the back of my mind that someone, someday, would unearth my notebook(s) in a dark, cobweb-covered attic and read them like I enjoy reading snippets of Ben Franklin’s or Oprah’s. Psh, my future reader just wouldn’t stand for my using different-colored pens or… un-even, handwritten lines or – God forbid – the occasional crossed-out phrase. Would Oprah approve of that?! I had to make it look professional, eloquent, casual, mysterious, deep, polished; AKA, everything I could not muster at approximately twelve years old.

Honestly, defacing the beautiful, white pages of an untouched notebook may have been my second-biggest fear, after dying. Quelle drama queen.

But when I got this latest, miraculous notebook for Christmas and had to make a pact not to buy any new notebooks until I was finished with it, something hit me.

I think it was actually the beautiful array of dots on the pages – the lack of intimidating, claustrophobic, straight lines – that freed me from my fear of messing up. The dots suggested creativity; they were in the background of my writing, providing guidance but lacking a rigorous structure.

I seriously had to keep telling myself, “it’s okay to use different pens in one notebook” and “nobody’s perfect” when I crossed something out, sounding like a true perfectionist working out her neuroses in microscopic scale. Besides the uniformity of the dates at the top of the pages, my notebook is a hodge-podge and I am so, so glad it is anything at all.

Now, instead of having three pristine pages full of nothing significant, I have a record of my adventures for the last six months. I can remember how I felt, what I did, and what I learned, and I’m excited to continue this new habit with a new, orange-banded notebook.
And to my (non-existent-because-I’m-never-letting-anyone-read-this-whole-thing) future reader: if you want perfect handwriting, go read someone else’s journal. Accepting imperfection was my impetus for any sort of writing at all.