Keep A Notebook

(It could help you live.)

Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

I didn’t always know that’s what I was doing.
But I was telling stories to survive long before I could name what was happening.

Those stories lived in a few small childhood notebooks.
Pages clumped together, they’re filled with words, stickers, strange phrases, names, dates, and places. I wrote Dec 2, 1990. I crossed out a school picture sticker with a Bic pen. I annotated my notes in a code that I still can’t figure out to this day.

I don’t always know what’s true or how it all connects. I only know the fragments mattered. They helped me remember. As I revisit those notebooks now and the notebooks of my adulthood too, I’m thanking little Brooklyn for thinking of big Brooklyn in the scribbles.

I think, if you want to keep a notebook, you’ll end up thanking yourself too.

Here’s how to keep …