#2 List by List: How Journaling Led to a Life I Didn't See Coming
Or, How I Stay Organized, Part 1. Plus, my favorite lip product, Princess Kate on the other side of chemo, CAT MOTHER, and a very good new thriller.
⭕️ Ilia Lip Sketch Hydrating Crayon It’s perfect. Matte, but not dry. I have it in two colors: Pampas and Kiln.1
⭕️ Princess Kate’s Gauzy Post-Chemo Narrative I always love seeing how
⭕️ Cat Mother T-Shirt If I were going to buy election merch, this is the one I’d get.3
⭕️ Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker A young mother does her best to suppress a violently traumatic childhood until one day the past shows up to threaten the obsessively wholesome life of lies she’s built. Reads like a thriller, but one whose accessories are deeply familiar: the hopes and dreams of the supplement aisle at a health food store, expensive billowy tops tucked into high-waisted canvas pants, babies as the ultimate distraction (and mirror). Plus, it’s set in Portland!4
A Ten-Year Look at Journals, Goals, and Growth
Heads up: This is a two-parter! First, a meditation on my relationship with planners (and their contents) over the past ten years. Next week, I’ll walk you through the digital tools I use now (which I REALLY like!) and share some tricks and resources I use to make it all ✨ aesthetic ✨.
I started using the Bullet Journal method of self-organization ten years ago, when we first moved to Portland. My first was a cloth-bound Marimekko notebook with blank white pages, which I hand-numbered.
For this first effort, I followed the playbook and created a detailed index of topics and page numbers, monthly overview, lists of birthdays, and pages for “responsible grown-up time” (lists of bills to pay, lol).
My first month had this list of tasks on page two:
Nothing huge, just, you know, securing shelter, building my career, making choices about the boys’ education, establishing food security, navigating a deeply flawed (and still unaffordable) healthcare system, and making sure it looks lovely and I’m thankful for it all.
Bullet Journaling is a system of self-organization that integrates goals and intentions with macro and micro to-dos. You regularly migrate items from a daily log to a parking lot of future tasks, and vice versa, perpetually reevaluating priorities. There’s a whole key of symbols that can be used to indicate progress and completion.
I stuck to this structure for the rest of 2014, ending on p. 99 with my January 2015 goals.
After that, things got a little loosie-goosie: I still had lists of bills to pay, daily to-dos, house projects, schools to check out for the boys, but also more pages of reflective journaling, copied out horoscopes and passages from personal development books.
The only thing I carried over from traditional Bullet Journaling after that first year was the daily log and a basic checklist box (I love checking a box).
I’ve been doing some version of this daily logging in a variety of journals for the past decade:
🏆 Leuchtturm1917 was my repeat favorite (I love the thickness of the page, the dot grid, the pocket for ephemera in the back, the elastic band that snaps it all together)
🔸 I tried Magic of I one year, but found the preset pages too restrictive (gorgeous quality, though)
🔸 I bought a Papier x Matilda Goad journal once because it’s so cute, but the paper quality was not as nice
Early on, I’d fill three journals in a calendar year. Then I started writing Morning Pages and realized that my inner work practice would do better in its own notebook, separate from the humdrum stuff that fills a planner.
I haven’t looked at these journals maybe even once since I finished them. When one was full, I’d stick it in a drawer with the rest and turn eagerly to its replacement (blank pages! a clean cover!).
After spending the week looking back, it’s most interesting to me to see that early integration of the mundane and the deep desires I had to know myself, to be myself — and how desperately I wanted it all to click together!
For most of the past decade, I’ve wanted so badly to hurry up and be already: be a capable adult, be a present mother, be in a thriving relationship, be successful in my career, be good at keeping house, be good at putting together outfits, be the kind of person who keeps up with car maintenance and has an enlightened meditation practice, be someone who ascends and ascends and ascends.
When I see my inner desires and the running lists of how I actually occupied my days placed side-by-side in those early journals, I see how much I wanted to be a fully established human — and how very much I was doing on a daily basis (“autumn equinox menu,” “tarnish screws,” “read all browser windows on phone,” “roast coffee,” “cozify beds so they’ll sleep in them,” every free activity the Multnomah County Library offered across all branches).
I wish that then-me could have found her way to greater ease earlier on, but also I’m grateful for the foundational work she did. A lot has grown from it.
My favorite realization from reading through these old planners and journals is how much of my highly specific (and wildly improbable) wishlists have actually been realized! Rarely in the ways I imagined they would, but almost exactly how I asked for them to (for example, we’re in the same house we were in when I dreamed up a new rental — but this house now matches almost everything on that list).
As an inherently forward-facing person, I rarely take the time to really think about and honor the past. This isn’t just true of reviewing journals: I didn’t celebrate the completion of my MFA because I was so thoroughly ready for the next stage of life to start; I was in such a hurry for all the hard phases of parenting in those early years to transform into something easier that I didn’t enjoy their sweetness; I’ve always wanted more, and it’s all rarely felt like enough.
But it’s all been so much more than I realized.
Next Sunday, I get into the systems I use now (one big reason I made the switch a year ago is because it’s so much easier to search and access the past in digital form) and how I’ve made the experience of writing on an iPad feel more like keeping a paper planner.
If you made it all the way to the bottom of this very long post, thank you! 🫡
I recently realized that Bobbi Brown had discontinued the Art Stick, which has been my go-to for almost a decade. In my desperation to hold on to a favorite thing for as long as possible, I spent too much on the last available one I could find (on Amazon; I think it’s legit). I tried on several shades of Ilia’s new crayon at the mall this summer and immediately purchased. I think it may be even better than the Art Stick!
The only minus in comparing the two is that the Ilia one is thinner, and won’t last as long.
Also discussed: Good Motherhood™, Christy Dawn, Ballerina Farm, Early Instagram “Film” Form, Prince William as prop, mom and dad are still having sex.
Last winter,
partnered with Kimberley King Parsons (We Were the Universe) on what I thought was a very clever way to encourage readers to preorder their forthcoming novels: if you emailed them proof of purchase for both books, you could participate in a 3-hour writing workshop on Zoom.Although it’s been awhile, I’ve seen my share of writing workshops — and it was still a great one! They gave a lot of attention to the inner work necessary to confronting blocks and sticking to a project as big as a novel (which, for me, has always felt like the bigger challenge than the craft of writing).
If you’re around, both Chelsea and Kimberley will be at the Portland Book Festival this November!
Chelsea - I enjoyed reading your blog post today! You are an amazing individual! Keep writing! - Ms. McCarthy