planning a year like keeping a notebook

Toward the end of last year, I began following a woman named Trina O’Gorman on Instagram. Trina is an avid journaler, except she doesn’t say that she keeps a journal. She says she keeps a notebook. She’s quite particular about this — except for hashtags, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her actually use the word “journal” in her posts, despite the fact that up and down her feed are photographs of beautiful leather journal notebook covers and gorgeous handwritten journal pages.

I. Love. This.

There’s something loaded about the word “journal” — it hints at lofty thoughts, at keen insights. Someone who keeps a “journal” has perfect penmanship. They’re erudite. I suspect many people shy away from journaling because the idea feels far too ambitious.

But a “notebook”? A notebook can be anything. A notebook can be doodles or sentence fragments. It can be a place to practice penmanship — or simply make scratch-marks that are barely legible to the writer when she returns to the pages months later. It can have meaningless sketches of random objects, or messy rings from an irresponsibly-placed coffee mug.

In other words, anyone can keep a notebook. Because a notebook requires nothing of its owner, except to be used.

So that’s it: I’m using the word notebook from now on.

It’s the beginning of a year (and, as it happens, a beginning of a new notebook for me). And like most people, I suppose, a lot of what I’m thinking (and writing) about revolves how I want my 2022 to look. I mentioned a couple of days ago that I’m a word-of-the-year girl, because it helps me more to have a word (VIBRANT) than a resolution. Because resolutions (like the word “journal”) have expectations attached to them. A resolution lapse hints at failure.

But simply having a word in my back pocket? There’s no failure — it just is. The point is to get to the end of the year and look back on it and see what kind of year I’ve woven, in the hope that its fabric as a whole reflects my word back to me, even as some days I felt more rooted in my word than others. I can think about how I want my word to look on any particular day and experiment and play and change how it looks on a whim. Some days my word will be large. Or perfect. Other days, it will be a small part of my day, or imperfectly executed. Whatever.

It’s like treating my year like my notebook.