I am a notebook hoarder. It’s not something I’m proud of, but it’s a problem I’ve had since childhood when I would spend my babysitting money on beautiful journals at Walden Books… and then store them under my bed. It took me years to realize that this situation wasn’t just a bad habit. It took me years to realize that this syndrome of not using the beautiful notebooks was a symptom of perfectionism. You see, I’d buy the book and then be traumatized by fear. Fear that I’d “mess it up”. Fear that I didn’t have the right pen, or that I’d have to cross something out and the notebook would no longer be perfect. It would no longer be beautiful.
I know this sounds strange, but I also know enough people who feel the same way. This silly, paralyzing thought that if you don’t use the notebook perfectly, if it’s not the most beautiful handwriting or the best doodles, it’s worthless. It wasn’t until I got pregnant that I realized how ridiculous–and damaging–these perfectionists tendencies were. I’d been sick during my pregnancy and had kept a journal while I was in the hospital. Maybe it was the overwhelming fear of losing my twins that drove away my worries over beauty and perfectionism, but regardless of why, I kept that journal religiously and it was a mess. This messy journal saved our family… and this is the story.
This was in the early stages of the internet and before cell phones, iPads, etc. That meant that I didn’t have access to a million streaming channels and couldn’t doom scroll for hours. I was stuck in a bed, almost upside down and pregnant with twins, for about 10 weeks. And I was bored. There was nothing to watch because there was no TV in the room. Well, there was the tiny rogue set my husband put in my room but since it had no remote I had to ask people to turn it on and off and change the channel. It was such a pain I ended up rarely watching it. Anyway, one day the nurse came in with a box of tissues, a small notebook, and a pencil. She told me that from now on I was to write down every single thing that happened while was in that hospital room. How many times I saw the doctors, all the medications and meals, etc. I was to document every single thing that happened, with time stamps, because one day I might need the record.
Totally bored, I figured why not. The next day I asked my husband to get me a larger notebook since I’d already filled up half of the small book the nurse had given me. But when he brought in one of my fancy notebooks I’d been hoarding (saving for the perfect moment), I hesitated. Since I had no control of the situation, I reluctantly decided to us this notebook to document my months in the perinatal ward. Weeks went by and I faithfully documented every single event that happened. The times and details of every meal, how many tissues I used, when I asked for the hand cream, etc. As the days continued, I found myself with all sorts of pens and pencils–whatever the nurses could find at their station and lend me. The journal got messier and noisier. I wrote down my schedules, then I added my feelings and worries and finally started documenting my vivid dreams. Since my room was next to the rooftop helicopter pad, I even kept track of when they’d land and take off.
By the time I had the babies and returned home, the notebook was almost all used up… and it was a mess. Filled with scratches, different colored inks, and even small crayon doodles of the strange things that happened while I was on hospital bedrest. But I was so busy with two tiny infants, born a few weeks early, that I just shoved my notebook into my desk drawer and got on with my life. A few weeks later, I received a certified letter from the hospital. It was a bill for $758,000. I almost dropped my daughter when I read the amount. There was no way we could ever pay off a bill like that. We were, essentially, bankrupt.
But instead of panicking, I called the insurance company and spoke to a lovely young woman who said she’d send me the itemized bill so I could review it. (Remember, this was over 20 years ago now!). It took a few days to receive it in the mail (no one had email yet!) and I discovered it was over 40 pages long, with tiny type, and listed over 1,000 small charges. I immediately realized that I was being charged for things that never happened, and I called the insurance company again. They asked me how I could prove the hospital bill was wrong, and I told them I had my journal. Well, to cut this long story short, it took almost a full year of working with the insurance fraud department–with my journal–to prove the hospital was lying about more than half of the things they’d charged me and the insurance company. I photocopied pages (again, before scanners) and mailed them to the insurance company. It took months to sort out, but at the end of the year the insurance company filed a fraud claim against the hospital and I ended up with a $300 refund check because of overcharges. So yay for my messy journaling!
But did I learn my lesson about the dangers of perfectionism? No. Of course not. It wasn’t until I decided that I wanted to shift my career from being a librarian to being an author that I hit another wall in this journey. I had joined a romance writers group and had gone to a few meetings with a new notebook. But during one of the meetings, a famous literary agent who was giving a lecture asked us to do some free writing in our notebooks. And, if we were courageous enough to read what we’d written aloud to the group, she’d consider asking for a full manuscript. (A full manuscript request is still a huge thing, even today, when querying agents). Except I was so worried about messing up–making the beautiful journal “less than” with my story that I barely knew how to write, I didn’t do anything. I was paralyzed with fear about how I didn’t know how to write, I wasn’t even sure if I was meant to become a romance writer, and all the other fears that plague artists. Combined with the fact I was using a new notebook my husband had given me to take notes, I just couldn’t bring myself to write down my story. This was a note-taking notebook, not a story notebook. It sounds so ridiculous now, but back then the monster of perfectionism had me within his teeth. Anyway, everyone else there wrote something, read it aloud, and ALL of them received a request for a full.
Except for me.
That night I went home and decided I was going to destroy this monster of perfectionism. So I pulled out all of my beautiful notebooks, grabbed the kids’ markers, and sat at the table. I was going to scribble in each of them, as if breaking the cursed hold they had on me. But then my kids appeared and, when they saw the notebooks, and markers, they went to work without me. They wrote in random pages, scribbled on the backs, used glitter glue and feathers, pulled out pages from the middle, and drew all sorts of pictures that looked nothing like the dinosaurs and princesses they believed them to be. But the fact their drawings had no relation to what they thought they were drawing didn’t matter to them. In fact, they were so happy and proud of their drawings that they ripped them out of my beautiful notebooks and hung them on the fridge. When they ran out of room there, they taped them to the walls around the house.
There weren’t afraid, or judging themselves, or concerned that the notebooks were ruined. And suddenly neither was I. As I held of the very expensive Rifle Paper notebooks that had been ripped and crayoned-over, I felt the stress melt away. I grabbed a grubby pencil, without an eraser, and started writing my story down on the sticky pages of these broken notebooks covered with glitter glue. It was as if the destruction of the notebooks was the permission I need to just start writing. Since the notebook was no longer perfect, what I wrote in it no longer needed to be perfect.
As the years went on, and I kept writing novels and getting rejected, I always performed the same ritual with a new notebook. I’d give it to one of my kids and let them write on the first page. As they got older, their scribbles turned into favorite quotes and supportive notes. And that was all I needed to get that notebook into action. Once it was no longer “whole”, once it was “broken in”, I could use it to handwrite stories, take notes, or just journal about my dreams. And then one day, as I pulled out a notebook I’d forgotten about, I found a quote written in the center of the notebook that my daughter had done for me in her best calligraphy. She’d done this a few years earlier, hoping the one day I’d find it when I needed a reminder that in order to be brave sometimes I just had to break the notebook.
Now my hope for you all is when you’re faced with a dream, and its corresponding crippling fear, that you’ll remember to pull out the most expensive, exclusive, beautiful notebook you have and break it. Because on the other side of the breaking is where you’ll find your miracle.
{And for my curious readers, the story that I didn’t write down for that agent ended up, years later, getting me a different agent and sold to a traditional publisher. That story, One Dark Wish, is book 2 in the Deadly Force Series.}
