Nothing Else But Words

Can you tell I favour a particular brand at all?

I was tidying my desk the other day (I know-shocking!) and as I was doing so I kept finding notebook after notebook. Some of them are full, some of them are nearly empty, and most of them are in varying states somewhere in the middle. And the thing is I can't throw them away, even the full ones, because they're full of wonderfully personal things that were pertinent to my life at some point, even if they are no longer.I just can't bring myself to casually throw out my thoughts, my words, that I've crafted into something with love and emotion and care-it feels a bit wrong to just chuck them in the bin.

Those notebooks are more like diaries to me, I suppose-if you flicked through any one of them you'd see a slice of my life at the time-a blog post, a poem, a half drafted letter, a to do list. I've never really been any good at keeping a proper diary-finding time at the end of every day to write about what I did always seemed tedious and boring to me, and more often than not the entries ended up dull and uninteresting. Between the pages of these notebooks, though, are little slivers of my feelings trapped on a page forever. If a total stranger happened upon them and read through some of them, they'd get a real impression of me, as if they'd just opened up my head and peered inside.

I've fallen into the habit of taking a notebook and pen everywhere I go so that I can write stuff down if inspiration strikes me-because too many times I have either had to buy one afresh or lost the idea completely without one. Another lives next to my bed so that I don't have to go too far to write down those weird-and-yet-completely-amazing flashes of inspiration your brain gives you whilst you are trying to fall asleep. I've always been some sort of 'writer'-whether that be stories that get started and never finished, angsty poems during my teens, letters to people that (more often than not) never got sent, and more recently blog posts which for the most part make their way on here in one form or another. I actually find it's a really good way to collect my thoughts-write things as if I was writing them to be read, even if I have no intention of that ever being the case. I just don't feel like I can throw these pieces of myself away-I've still got (somewhere) a notebook full of heartbroken letters that I wrote to my very first boyfriend almost 8 years ago, which I don't think anyone's ever clapped eyes on but myself. Even now, in this very notebook that I am writing this blog post in, there are things that I've never shared with anyone, pieces that will probably never become actual posts because they expose me rather too much, emotionally, and I'd always rather say too little than too much. It's not necessarily that I don't want people to read them, but I'm not offering them up for public scrutiny, let's put it that way.

I think it's basically that, for me at least, these notebooks are little pieces of myself, memories pressed between the pages as if they were pretty autumn leaves-and when I flick through the older ones I can still feel a sense of those feelings that are trapped there in black and white. I'm quite sure that I will end up with a shelf full of old notebooks when I am older, dusty from under-use and yellowing with age. But I will I throw them out even then? Not a chance. These pages hold my words, my thoughts, my mind and sometimes my heart. How could I get rid of that?

-Jenni-

The title is taken from this quote, attributed to John Locke: "So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with."