A few years ago I jumped onto the bullet journal train. Like many people, I’m halfway convinced that the chaos of my life will be resolved by the perfect planner or notebook so the bullet journal, with it’s promise of having everything in one colour-coded and stickered place was. well. promising. And for a while it worked. I had one book that contained my calendar, the notes I take while reading or at a conference, sewing projects, ideas, and whatever else I needed to keep track of. But, like all systems it only works as long as you maintain it and I’m not very good at maintaining things so like most writers I’ve got a handful of partially used notebooks that I periodically flip through desperately trying to find that thing I wrote down one time.
Eventually I stopped doing it, and I just kept notebooks for whatever I was reading. Jotting down the thoughts and ideas that came to me while I read, noting particular quotes that seemed important. Then one day I picked up an old notebook and saw that it was easier to read with all the stickers and postit notes I had used to break up the text. My handwriting hasn’t improved any, it’s small and cramped which some blog posts have assured me is a sign of genius, but at least the landscape is broken up a little and it isn’t pages and pages of spidery script even I have a hard time reading.
This of course spilled over into my planner. Between not being wild about the planner I’ve got (but yay, new year new planner amirite?) and scrapbooking/bullet journal tiktok I’m now tearing paper and using stickers and washi tape to create what the kids call spreads to both decorate my life and cover up the affirmation-centric goal driven design of this particular planner. When I was in grade school we called them collages, but I guess when you’re using expensive papers, washi tape, and stickers you need a new name for what you’re doing. So I create spreads in my planner that sometimes cover entire days.
It began as a strategy to block off time. Can’t agree to do something on a day I can’t write on. And that seems to be working. Except in the monthly calendar where a sticker prompts me to look in the weekly planner for the details. Now you know more about me than you probably wanted to, but if you are also a writer or somebody struggling for a way to bring your chaos under control I offer it up to you. The stickers also make the month look more festive than feverish.
It’s an ephemeral art form. Which is what it’s doing here. Because as much as I make fun of myself for playing with stickers and tape, the end results of these spreads are getting pretty good. Not quite tiktok worthy, some of those creators are making some beautiful things, but I’m getting better at judging textures and colours. And it’s an art form that nobody will see. Every week I turn the page of my weekly planner and the spread I created becomes the past. Notebooks get put on the shelf, retrieved only when I’m looking for something from a particular book.
That reminds me that I can make mistakes. Because even the worst spread will eventually become history and I don’t have to look at it again if I don’t want to. Learning can be difficult, particularly when we’re afraid to make mistakes. In my book I write about a drum group I belong to being a place where we can make mistakes and be drawn back in and the impact that has had on me as a person. I can say without any exaggeration, that without the drum group and the podcast with Kerry this book would not have happened. They were places where I could make mistakes, where we could all learn together. Where relationships could be mended. Having places like that are so important. Building places like that are so important.
I’m trying to build places like that. One sticker at a time.