In my younger years, I found a place to hide. I started escaping into notebooks, filling them as fast as my hand could move across the pages. 

I began to see each notebook as an empty house that I filled from top to bottom as quickly as possible. When I finished one, I immediately moved on to the next. I tried not to look too closely at the world outside of those notebooks. My mental refuse was comforting to me in a way.

I started my first “rambling journal” when I was fifteen, shortly before the COVID lockdown, after reading Natalie Goldberg’s writing guides, Writing Down the Bones and Wild Minds. Goldberg encouraged me to forsake grammar, structure, common sense, coherence, meaning, questioning, and everything else that is supposed to make writing “good.” I had a lot of time during the lockdown to work towards Goldberg’s proposed goal–filling up one notebook every month with raw writing material from the deepest part of me.

Of course, I picked up my own ideas along the way. From childhood, I had been inventing characters through the “name game”–opening a baby-name dictionary at random, writing down the first name I saw, and then building a character around that name. I’d tear people (in picture form) from magazines and invent stories about those people, sometimes becoming so obsessed with certain pictures that I would take years to throw them away. In my handmade writing guide, which I called “Dr. Lydia’s Magic Writing Cure,” or something like that. I suggested writing on the edge of a cliff to add a sense of danger and passion to stories. Another suggestion from Goldberg involved getting out everything you love–all your favorite food, music, going to your favorite place, and pampering yourself half to death–and using all of this healing energy to write.

It has been more than four years and probably forty filled notebooks later, since I started “writing down the bones,” as Goldberg once said. I envision a room stuffed full of my notebooks. Whole houses full of my notebooks. There is no limit anymore. I can write down anything I want. 

These days, I feel detached from my writing. I see my words as wooden blocks that I shuffle around. They feel marvelously neutral; they don’t have to define me. I love notebooks because they are neither friendly nor unfriendly. I might feel terrible about something I write, but all that my notebooks can do is offer me another blank page; there is always another chance. 

Now, even when I have feel like nobody wants or likes me, even when I feel that I am weird or unlikeable, I always have my notebooks.