There is a small drawer in my apartment that feels heavier than it should. Inside, stacked in uneven piles, are paper notebooks of every possible shape and color. Some are half-filled with grocery lists and abandoned thoughts, others hold only a few tentative sentences before I must have decided that this particular notebook was not worthy of what I was trying to say. Yet I keep buying more, even though I have a phone that could hold an entire library of my notes, organized, synced, and backed up forever.
It’s not rational. In fact, I would argue it’s defiantly irrational. But every time I walk past a stationery shop, I feel a tug in my stomach, like an itch I know only the sound of a pen scratching paper can soothe. The digital world might promise infinite storage and convenience, but it never gives me the weight of a notebook resting in my hand, the slightly awkward bulk of it under my arm as if I’m carrying a secret.
The truth is, paper has a rhythm that my phone screen will never have. A notebook is slow in the best way. It doesn’t light up or buzz. It doesn’t suggest that I revisit something from two years ago. It waits quietly until I open it, and then it receives whatever version of myself arrives on that page. If my handwriting is crooked because I was tired, the notebook remembers it without complaint. If the ink smudges, the smudge becomes part of the story.
Sometimes I think I buy notebooks for their future selves, not their present use. A blank notebook holds more potential than any empty note-taking app. Opening a new one feels like stepping into a room where the walls haven’t been painted yet and the air smells like plaster and possibility. The first page is terrifying—like silence before the first word in a conversation. I often skip it, jumping to the second page as if I’m sneaking past a guard.
There’s also a strange intimacy in the way notebooks age. A phone app is always the same, sterile and polished, but notebooks soften. The corners curl, the spine cracks, the cover absorbs the oils of my fingers. When I pull out an old one, it feels like shaking hands with my past self, complete with all her smudges, doodles, and messy obsessions. I once found a notebook from when I was seventeen, filled with elaborate to-do lists for a life that hasn’t turned out remotely as planned. There was something humbling about that—the reminder that my mind has always been a restless catalog of ideas, even if half of them never mattered in the long run.
When I write in a notebook, I also notice time differently. Digital notes feel endless, like air. You can always scroll, always add more. But notebooks come with boundaries—pages that run out, spines that eventually resist being stuffed. That limit forces me to live with the thought I’ve just written down instead of endlessly editing it. A notebook is a container, and once it’s full, I’m left with an object that cannot be updated, cannot be “corrected,” cannot be deleted.
There’s a comfort in that permanence. I know the irony: paper is fragile, subject to coffee spills, mold, fire. But somehow that fragility makes it more alive. My phone could fall into a river and I’d lose thousands of notes without even remembering what they contained. A soaked notebook, on the other hand, would still bear the ghost of my handwriting, the ink bleeding like veins through the page.
My attachment to paper notebooks sometimes makes me feel like I’m resisting an entire current pulling the world in another direction. Everyone else seems to be uploading their lives, polishing their thoughts into searchable databases, while I’m still flipping through unevenly cut pages. But maybe that resistance is what I love most. Buying a notebook feels like a small rebellion against efficiency. It’s impractical, unnecessary, and entirely indulgent—and maybe that’s what makes it precious.
There are also rituals attached to notebooks that no app can replicate. The decision of which one to start next, the pleasure of choosing a pen that glides or scratches, the moment when a notebook is finally finished and I press the cover closed like sealing a letter. Even the sound of a page turning feels different than the swipe of a screen. It’s not about nostalgia; it’s about texture, about life lived through friction instead of gloss.
Sometimes I wonder if my notebooks will outlive me. If one day, someone will find the drawer and sift through the scribbles, trying to piece together a life from half-finished thoughts and shopping lists that no longer matter. Maybe they’ll laugh at the dramatic ramblings in the margins, or maybe they’ll recognize themselves in the messiness. Either way, I like the thought that these stacks of paper hold a human weight that no digital archive can ever quite replicate.
The funny thing is, I don’t always use my notebooks for profound thoughts. Most days, they’re just vessels for reminders—milk, bread, call the landlord, buy batteries. But even those ordinary words gain a kind of dignity when written on paper. The notebook holds them with the same seriousness as it would a dream or a poem. It doesn’t distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. It lets me decide that later.
So yes, in a world where everything is digitized, where my phone can remember more than I ever will, I still find myself wandering into stationery shops and leaving with another blank companion. I don’t need it, but maybe that’s the point. A notebook isn’t about need—it’s about presence. About capturing a thought with ink and paper before it evaporates into the endless cloud. About the weight of a drawer that feels heavier than it should, filled with stories I may never tell, but ones that belong only to me.
