You Don't Need an Expensive Journal (You Need a Cheap One)

Let me tell you what I thought a journal was supposed to be...

Indiana Jones.

Specifically the grail diary in The Last Crusade — leather-bound, thick with age, wrapped in a strap, crammed with sketches and maps and slanted handwriting that obviously belonged to a man with a destiny.

That was my mental image, Reader. That was the bar I set for myself at sixteen years old. Something worth keeping. Something an archaeologist finds in a hundred years and gasps at.

And I could not afford anything even distantly related to that. So I carried around a quiet little belief for years — one I now know a whole lot of you are carrying too:

Journaling is kind of a rich-person hobby.

You need the good leather one.
The nice pen.
The thick cream paper that doesn't bleed through.

And since I had none of that, whatever I was doing in a spiral notebook felt like the discount version of the real thing.

Then I'm standing in the back-to-school aisle at Target.

Composition books.
The black-and-white marbled ones we all had.
Thirty-five cents.

And I got giddy.

Genuinely, embarrassingly giddy, in a store aisle, over a notebook that cost less than a pack of gum.

Standing right there, I finally understood the thing that had quietly been sabotaging me for twenty years:

You cannot ruin a 35-cent notebook.

You can write badly in it.
You can misspell things and scratch them out and press hard enough to tear the page.
You can fill four pages and abandon it forever.
You can throw it away.
You can lose it in a move and genuinely never think about it again.

It was thirty-five cents.

Here's the teaching underneath that.

The expensive notebook is not inspiring you.
It's raising the stakes.

A beautiful leather journal arrives with an unspoken contract: what goes in here had better be worth the notebook. And that contract gets enforced hardest on page one — which is precisely where most people quit...forever.

Cheap paper does the opposite.

It asks nothing of you.
It has no opinion about your handwriting.
It can't be desecrated, because there's nothing there to desecrate in the first place.

The nice notebook is a stage.
The cheap one is a napkin.
And people are so much more honest on a napkin.

Your one small thing this week.

It is peak back-to-school season, which means every store in the country currently has composition books for under a dollar. Go buy one. Buy three, honestly.

Then, and this is the actual assignment, deliberately mess up the first page.

Scribble on it.
Write the date wrong.
Tear a corner off.

Get it over with, so there's no "pristine page" left to protect.

Then hit reply and tell me: what's the beautiful notebook you're currently saving for something better? I know you have one. Most of us do. Tell me what it looks like and how long it's been waiting.

Deep breaths. Just write.

Krystal

P.S. If there's a gorgeous unused journal sitting on your shelf right now, consider this your official permission to write today's grocery list in it.

P.P.S. Have you grabbed the TMTJ First 30 Pages PDF guide yet? It has everything you need to get started with a lasting journaling practice.

$27.00 The First 30 Pages The journaling guide for people who always quit journaling. The First 30 Pages hands you a gentle 30-day journaling... Read more Get it now!

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P.P.P.S. I've had some semi-viral shenanigans happening over @teachmetojournal on IG lately. Check it out here.