Writing in Notebooks Is My New Personality

Writing in Notebooks Is My New Personality

Imogen Clarke

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“Notebooks” by Imogen Clarke

I first found out about the notebooks from David. Interesting that somebody so pedestrian would change my life, but I suppose it had to come from somebody. If it wasn’t him it would have been one of the others. Or anybody, really. The source is not important. Obviously David was thrilled to be the instigator in our little group, but he has to take small victories doesn’t he.

He found out from his therapist. David was the last person I knew who was still doing therapy. Even Sophie couldn’t afford it anymore and she got pay raises in line with inflation. I dismissed the idea at first. It sounded like something I’d tried before. Bullet journals. Morning pages. Daily gratitudes. Hadn’t made a difference. “You didn’t use enough notebooks,” David said. “You need at least three.” That was the baseline. If you were doing ok, you needed three. But complicated people, with serious problems, creative inclinations, difficult thoughts, for them three was not enough. “I’m starting with ten,” David said. I immediately went out and bought fifteen. We all did. We just didn’t tell David how many. He was very insecure about the fact he didn’t have a diagnosed mental illness. We had to be mindful of that.

I didn’t start using my notebooks until I saw how they worked in practice. It was at Ben and Sophie’s house, maybe a week later. Ten minutes into the lentil ragu, David suddenly put down his fork, reached into his pocket and extracted a manila A6 notebook. Impressively nondescript. A flash of panic came over Claire’s face. Her notebooks were probably pink or purple or yellow, covered in stickers of potted plants and dolphins. She was already doing it wrong. I stuck a big piece of garlic baguette into my mouth to hide my smirk and made sure to observe David carefully. I’d decided to be the best at notebooks.

He only wrote for a few seconds, can’t have jotted down more than a sentence or two. Then he put the notebook back in his pocket, lifted his fork, and took another mouthful of linguine. Slowly. He was doing everything very slowly. And we were all quiet, of course, watching him, waiting for him to look up and say, “Oh, of course the notebooks, you must have questions about the notebooks!” He was loving every second of it. Finally he did look up and quietly said, “Lara, could you pass the parmesan please?” and Lara nearly screamed. She said she wouldn’t hand over the cheese until he told her what he’d been writing, and David said, “Well perhaps this is the impetus I need to finally go vegan” (moronic!), and then he talked about the notebooks for quite a while without really saying anything at all, just things like however you do the notebooks is the right way to do the notebooks and it’s really more of an instinctive thing and you’ll get the hang of it don’t worry.

So there we were, Lara fuming, Claire panicking about her ugly twee stickers, David, smug as anything. And that would have continued for a while, even as the conversation inevitably moved on to other things. Dating shows, spelt flour, personal vendettas. And then there would have been a fight about something, Lara’s cat maybe, because everybody knew it was her fault the poor thing had stress induced cystitis and kept pissing on her bed. We didn’t say anything usually when she brought it up, when she talked about how annoying the cat was (what a thing to say! about a cat!), but after a few bottles of wine somebody, probably Sophie, would ask if Lara had tried providing more of a structured routine for the cat and Lara would say, “I don’t like that accusatory tone, Sophie,” and Sophie would say, “I’m just looking out for the welfare of an animal,” and Lara would say, “You’re not better than me just because you have a dog! If I had inheritance and a garden, I’d get a dog as well and it would piss all over you!” and then Claire would inexplicably burst into tears, because whoever knew what was going on with her. I’ve known Claire the longest of any of them but I do find her difficult to read. Of course it’s difficult for her, because she never really grew into her looks the way I did, even though at school she was the pretty one and I was the intellectual. That’s what everybody said and now, bless her, she’s still not that smart, and those pink dungarees aren’t doing her any favors. 

So thank god Ben was there. Because Ben said something like, “Gosh, David.” That’s how Ben talked, he said things like, “Gosh, David.” And then he’d follow up with something inane like, “I’m really struggling with these notebooks, you know.” And then, if you can believe it, “I’d really, genuinely, appreciate some tips.” And if anybody else had uttered such a pathetic and earnest string of words they’d be treated with the contempt they deserved, but not Ben. Who knows what it is about some people. I guess he’s just nice. And it meant that David shared his notebook technique with us, and talked about personal growth and about doing the work, and everybody took notes, thought up their own adjustments, and I suppose that’s when things really got underway.

That was the last time that David got to hold court. Laughable really, when you think about it now. How we used to be quiet and listen to him. Now I don’t even read his texts.

The next dinner was at Lara’s house. I busied myself in the kitchen making margaritas—it was Claire’s first week in her new job and I didn’t want to hear about it. She’s never been very resilient. I was absorbed in my task, enjoying the sound of the ice clattering cheerfully, when I realized the table had gone silent. Everybody was writing in their notebooks. Well that was interesting. I brought the drinks through and set them down and a few people nodded in thanks. David didn’t make a comment about it being a Tuesday and Sophie didn’t pointedly say that she was fine with water actually and Ben took a sip and raised an eyebrow but he didn’t say that it was a bit strong wasn’t it. They all just kept scribbling. So I sat down and got out the notebook I’d brought with me, a forest green moleskine, and I wrote: I love margaritas and I want to drink them every day. And then I looked around and watched everybody else writing for a bit, and I wrote: Silence is golden. It felt shameful to have written something so trite, I would never have dared say it out loud. But the notebook was just for me. I crossed out golden and wrote margaritas in its place, and that seemed even worse somehow. The stupidest thought I could put down to paper. It was a thrill. It was so much better than talking. 

They were happening everywhere, these revelations, I suppose. We were early adopters, but we weren’t the first.

The silence was only temporary that night. The rest of the evening was similar to usual. We ate vienetta and took personality tests. Lara got an empathy score of 0/6 in the Hogan Personality Inventory and was furious. She stomped around the living room, shrieking. Any excuse to cause a scene. “Zero!” arms flailing. “Zero!” triple sec spilling over Ben and Sophie’s new floors. “Zero!” I also got zero, but people expected that, and I didn’t care. “Zero! Zero! Zero!” The flailing arms made contact with Claire’s nose but Lara didn’t notice. Usually David would have stepped in at this point but he was sulking over his low scores in the creativity section. “What about curiosity?” I asked helpfully. David wasn’t particularly bright but surely anybody could be curious. He didn’t respond. Well he was getting no sympathy from me in that case. A low curiosity score frankly meant he wasn’t even trying to be interesting.

I left soon afterwards. Claire’s nose bleed was off putting, and I could tell Sophie blamed me because I’d brought tequila again. Anyway I was eager to go home and write in my notebooks. I’d had such a fun evening, I felt very full of gratitude. And David had suggested we devote an entire notebook to that very topic.

Lara is a narcissist, I wrote. If David ever admitted how normal he is, he’d die of shame. I don’t think Ben and Sophie have sex anymore. Claire makes me uncomfortable. Why do I keep getting diarrhea? I was jumbling up notebooks back then. I hadn’t figured out the systems yet. But I was starting to understand what it was about, and so was everybody else.

We all went for a hike the following weekend, stopping every twenty seconds to write something or other down in a notebook. It seemed that most people had brought five or six books with them, so I was very pleased to be hauling around ten.

“You know you don’t need to have all your books with you at all times,” David said.

“Oh, I’ve only brought half of mine,” I replied, gleefully drinking in the look of panic in David’s face. Sophie whispered something in Ben’s ear. Claire suddenly started walking back in the direction we’d just come from. She did that kind of thing sometimes. The sun was shining off the hills. It was glorious.

From then on we all took enormous hiking rucksacks everywhere we went. They barricaded us in at the pub, where we sat silently scribbling. Conversation ceased almost entirely around week three or four. Why would you talk when you could write? If you’d just been to see a film you wouldn’t chat about it afterwards, you’d write it down in your notebooks, hash out your thoughts there. It was embarrassing to think about, really, how much we’d shared in the past. Our half-baked thoughts, those worries you have that are there one day and gone the next. How much of each other’s time we’d wasted! It became clear to me—conversation was just practice. That’s all it had ever been. Why talk to mediocre friends who were just trying to put their basic thoughts in order? The only reason I had ever tolerated this was so that I could talk back, so I could sort out my thoughts. But I didn’t need people anymore, I had my notebooks.

We need to stop rehearsing with each other, I wrote in Notebook #27. Let’s talk again when we have something worthwhile to say. I was on a roll. The thoughts I was coming up with. Unstoppable. Nobody in my way. Just the notebooks, just my own mind, encouraging, clarifying, putting the pieces together. Clogs, I wrote in Notebook #35. The others are clogging me up with their stupid opinions. I opened up Notebook #14. The best utensil is a spoon. Notebook #8. Lara’s cat is an incel.

Notebook #12. Buy peppermint capsules. Notebook #1. I’m notebook-maxxing.

I hosted the next dinner. I’d been working on improving my digestion and was undertaking an elimination diet to try and reduce bloating. We’re just tubes. Food goes in, shit comes out. Notebook #19. I served boiled white rice with black pepper. Nothing else. Nobody said anything, of course, they just wrote furiously in their notebooks. Most people got out several notebooks, writing in them all simultaneously. Sophie was colour coding, Lara had highlighters. Am I a tube or is there a tube inside me? The rice was overcooked, mushy and wet. The tubes are dying.

Afterwards we sat in the living room where we could write more comfortably. I put on a Randy Newman album, one I was sure everybody would hate. If it was two months earlier, everybody would have shouted at me. If it was two months earlier, Lara would have asked me about my new throw, instead of casually running her fingers over it, pretending she wasn’t actively seeking out the label to check if it was 100% cashmere (it was). If it was two months earlier, David would have said something extremely obvious about my new Leonora Carrington print, in order to demonstrate that he recognized it, instead of just staring at it with great intention in his face, and then looking around hoping to catch somebody’s attention. But it wasn’t two months earlier. It was blissful silence. I wrote about tubes for three hours.

Notebooks encourage proper rumination. It became distasteful to express an incomplete thought, an emotion that hadn’t been analysed. Even asking a question was frowned upon, if it was possible to find the answer yourself. At one point, Sophie started to say something. She thought she was ready, she thought she was finished. She only got three words in before Ben leaned over and clamped her mouth shut.

I spent Christmas alone with my notebooks. I explained to my mother, briefly over text, that I didn’t have any complete thoughts to share at that time, so the journey to Buckinghamshire seemed unnecessary. She wasn’t happy about it, but she understood. She had a few notebooks by then, the food bank where she volunteered had started giving them out. It was already helping her quite a bit. She’d stopped calling me so often.

I met up with the others in early January. I had no desire to see anybody, but I knew from my notebook work that if I went more than two weeks in isolation I would start to get acid reflux. And it was very pleasant in the pub. Quiet. Notebooks. Until Claire started crying.

Everybody shot her a sympathetic glance of course, I think Sophie even patted her on the shoulder. And then we turned back to our notebooks. When I looked up maybe fifteen minutes later, it was still going on. I nudged Lara. She cleared her throat and everybody saw what was happening, and we all waited politely. Waited for her to deal with it. Until finally, Ben, very gently, said, “Did you forget your notebooks, Claire?” She didn’t reply, just kept weeping into her pint. And I thought, well maybe she’s embarrassed, because at this point, who would forget their notebooks? Poor Claire. Poor stupid Claire. Perhaps I could tear a sheet out of one of my notebooks, and she could write in it and then glue it into her own book for later. It would be messy, but what are friends for? Or maybe they’d have some spares behind the bar. I was about to get up and ask when I saw it. A spiral bound notebook, peeking out of Claire’s jacket pocket.

It happened a couple more times. We reached breaking point when Claire called Sophie up and asked if they could talk. Said she wasn’t doing so good. Said she needed a friend. Well, that’s not right. That’s not how you should treat somebody, like a notebook. Claire wasn’t Sophie’s problem. And she said as much. Tactfully, of course. Sophie’s empathy score was 3/6. We didn’t see Claire after that. Last I heard, she’d moved to Germany and joined a wild swimming group, which is stupid because I’d already tried wild swimming years ago and it didn’t make any difference whatsoever. Faulty tubes, I wrote in Notebook #97. Deficient in notebooks. Notebook #84. You can’t control everything that comes out but you can control what goes in. Notebook #104. Half a cup of oats, boiled in water, pinch of salt. Handful of chopped and roasted hazelnuts. Five grams of psyllium husk. Bowel movement, Bristol stool scale type 3. Notebook #213.

This was in March and the notebooks were already everywhere. Who could have guessed that David would have stumbled onto a therapist who was actually at the forefront of something? Usually I’d be sceptical about anything that popular, but the notebooks just seemed right to me. Probably because they are. Of course, people complained when GPs started prescribing the notebooks, and then that they were overprescribing them, that it had become impossible to get any other kind of treatment, that the NICE recommendations were updated without proper consultation, that the introduction into schools happened too quickly. It was the usual suspects. Cowards who need their hands held, thirty-year-old children who won’t take agency over their own lives. Stupid people who were unable to grasp the message, the very basic message of the notebooks—stop expecting anybody to listen to you.

Ben and Sophie felt differently. “What are we losing?” Sophie asked, and I bristled at the sound of her shrill voice. It had been so long, I’d forgotten how annoying it was. “What are we giving up in place of these notebooks? What happened to society?” I packed up my books and walked away, my buddha bowl half finished. I wasn’t surprised this had happened. I was sure that Ben and Sophie still talked to each other. They didn’t know how to be silent in each other’s company. So they’d never really done the notebooks properly, never grasped what it was all about. And that’s why Sophie had thought it was acceptable to start shrieking at me about social welfare and youth groups and GP appointments. Sophie’s always been obsessed with the idea of structural problems. She’s never been very good at looking inward.

The more I’d gotten into notebooks, the more I’d found politics to be completely redundant. You have to start with the individual, self-improvement can only ever come from within. I assumed everyone else had also stopped going on marches, but maybe Ben and Sophie still were. That was concerning. That was a lot of time away from notebooks. Were they writing on placards? How much thought were they putting into their slogans? I would have liked to explain my tube theory to them both, to help them understand how everybody ultimately had the power to manage their own lives, to control their tube, but it wasn’t ready yet. I hadn’t quite figured out how to tie it in with my theories about notebooks. I was planning to keep my distance from those two now anyway, after that outburst. David seemed happy to avoid the politics discussions as well, which wasn’t surprising. I’d always suspected him of being a moderate, but too embarrassed to admit it. I don’t know what Lara felt about anything. Every now and then I’d sneak a peek at her notebooks, while she was scrawling away. She’d started using a red crayon, and for the past month or so all she’d been doing was drawing crude depictions of her cat. Most recently, I noticed the cat had grown wings, like an angel.

It’s not easy to fully commit to notebooks, and not just because of the intellectual discipline required. There are practical barriers too. By the end of that first year there really should have been more provisions in place, some kind of assistance for those of us who were doing it properly. Proper storage on trains, for example. When I went to the Isle of Skye with Lara and David, there was still nowhere to put our notebooks. We’d had to reserve extra seats on the train to Edinburgh, just for the books. It caused problems on the packed train, the people standing were pretty salty about it, but that’s why you need to reserve. We’d paid for the tickets, as I explained to anybody who objected. And surely they could see, from the number of notebooks we had, that perhaps our problems were a little bit more serious than theirs, our thoughts, frankly, quite a bit more sophisticated. A woman holding a tatty block of neon post-it notes scowled at me. I was hauling around 97 notebooks at this point. There was so much more to me than she could ever comprehend.

I was still stuck on the tubes. It was all I could really write about. Dozens of notebooks filled with my speculations as to what had happened to Claire’s tube, with no satisfactory answer. It was really very generous of me to be devoting so much of my thinking time to Claire. Our friendship had never made much sense in the first place, I only agreed to the relationship because she’d cornered me when I was eight years old and powerless. When I didn’t have notebooks. But I do feel bad for her nonetheless. She’s never been very cerebral. She’ll keep throwing her body into cold water, posting on Instagram, talking. She’ll never get anywhere like that and I’ll admit, it’s a real limitation of the notebooks, that they don’t work for people like her. That’s why I was working away, studiously tackling the task of Claire’s tube, when in fact my own tube was causing me all sorts of problems. The prune experiment was almost certainly the culprit, but I’d have to check Notebook #213 to be certain, and I’d left that one at home.

The train came to a halt just outside Peterborough. Par for the course these days. We were all scribbling away, no big deal. Our destination wasn’t going anywhere. But then the electricity went off. Well, whatever, it was still daylight outside, and notebooks didn’t need charging did they. Except the air conditioning was linked to the electricity. And it was August. A particularly hot August. And now the people standing and sweating were becoming more resentful about the notebooks. And my tube really wasn’t feeling great.

I stood up and saw somebody make a beeline for my seat.

“I’m coming back,” I said. “I’m just going to the toilet.”

“You can’t go to the toilet,” the somebody said. “The doors are electric. There’s no electricity.”

“What about in Coach A?” I asked, “the Coach A toilet doors aren’t electric.” They shrugged, turning back to their notebook.

Coach A was a snake of people, scrawling away. I stepped over bodies napping in the aisles. Notebooks under their heads.

“Is this a queue, or are you just standing?”

Nobody replied. Notebooks. My guts spasmed. I realized that in my rush I hadn’t brought a single notebook with me. I tried to remember my most recent thoughts and saw only blank pages. Panic set in. My tube. I had to do something about my tube.

I peered at a middle aged man with a red face. What did he have to write about? What problems could he possibly have? I couldn’t take it, I grabbed the notebook out of his hands. It was an unacceptable act. A woman fainted in response. Scribbling intensified. The man’s pages were horrible. Intense despair.

“You need therapy,” I said.

“There is no therapy,” he replied.

“Is this a queue, or are you just standing?” I asked. He didn’t reply.

I fought my way down the line, stepping over the fainted woman. People recoiled as I got near, held their notebooks close to their chests. Finally, I made it to the door.

“It’s locked,” somebody whispered. “It’s been locked the whole time.”

I shook the handle to no avail. My tube broke down.

It’s important to have humbling experiences. That’s how you strengthen your resolve. Because accidents happen. It’s what you do afterwards that matters. It’s what happens next that determines your fate. So I’m glad I was in that situation, I’m glad I felt, for one small moment, what it’s like to be Claire. I didn’t cry, of course, but there was a release of fluids. An uncontrollable release of fluids. And no way for me to escape, no notebook to write in. An old man started clawing at the windows. He’d forgotten that they don’t open on these trains. Minutes passed, maybe hours. I was paralyzed. The stench was horrific. A child threw up. My thoughts were empty. I could only feel. The child’s mother screamed at me. A growing desperation. Dripping down my legs. The inhabitants of Coach A fled, heads bowed, avoiding my gaze, stepping through vomit, stepping through feces, silent and furious. Finally somebody gave me what I needed.

To do. I wrote. One. Remove clothing. Two. Wipe self with t-shirt. Three. Place shirt on pool of excrement. It wasn’t possible to cover everything, of course, but so be it. Four. Trousers, also. Yes that was an improvement, an excellent addition. Five. Lift right foot and place 20cm ahead. Now we were getting somewhere. Six. Repeat with left foot. I began walking. Seven. Check the luggage rack for a better pen. Nothing to be found but so be it. I’m a pro, I could make do with a biro. Eight. Keep going. Oh absolutely. Nine. You’re doing great. I truly was! Scribbling away. Naked and invigorated. Ten. Enter Coach B. Filth on my feet and a smile on my face. A notebook in my hand. And there in front of me, my good friend from earlier, the man with the red face and the troubled thoughts! I looked up from my notebook to embrace him, to plant a gentle kiss on his large bald head. I could see his lips move, the dear man was trying to communicate with me but I couldn’t hear a word, how strange that I really couldn’t hear a thing. “Tubes!” I shouted, but I wasn’t sure if I managed to make a sound above the roar of notebooks. Eleven. Next destination: Coach C! Onwards I traveled, parting the aisles, admirers leaping out of the way to facilitate my journey. More friends, more notebooks. I grabbed them out of people’s hands, overcome by their generosity, by their recognition that I had important work to do, that my thoughts were more necessary than theirs. A man in a navy blazer handed me a stack of napkins, but there was really no need, I had more than enough notebooks at that point. What do Ben and Sophie mean when they say there’s no community anymore? This is community! Twelve. Push that woman. Why? She is in your way. Oh it’s true, and how much harder it was becoming to see things off the page, my vision blurring, the words clear but nothing else. Was I back at my seat yet? My destination no longer seemed important. I wrote. I thought. I didn’t stop. I was free again.

New page. New notebook. Important train thoughts. Free of my tube. Tears and feces. It’s all the same. I didn’t need a hero’s welcome as I marched through the doors of Coach E, triumphant. The body is separate from notebooks, it exists outside of notebooks. I didn’t expect Lara and David to jump up and offer assistance, to help me deal with the man who had taken up residence in my seat. What is the body? I knew they couldn’t yet understand the significance of what had happened, what was still happening. It moves around, things go in, things come out. That can’t be avoided. I knew all they could do was look, and very well, look if you must. It’s disgusting, but even calling it disgusting gives it too much credit. Look at my naked body, look at my soiled hands. What if the body was a notebook? I am beyond looking. Destroy all the mirrors. I am endeavouring to stay in the notebooks, I am working towards just being notebooks. I have almost succeeded. The body is a test. Claire failed the test but I will not! Fluids fluids fluids. I don’t care what happens to my fluids anymore as long as they don’t spill onto my notebooks. I don’t care if my fluids are spilling onto you because you are not a notebook. Tears and feces tears and feces. David’s mouth opening and closing. Lara’s arms moving erratically. The sweet stench of notebooks. There’s no point trying to communicate with me. Go on, leave. Get off this train, you are not ready. You were never even close. Everything outside of the notebooks is nothing.  You think this is too hard, but I remember how it used to be. No more talk. This is so much better.