Heeding the call to make notes
How a house basket and a personal practice keep me tethered to myself
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This is my house basket.
My trusty sidekick, it journeys with me as I traverse the house throughout the day: resting on the table that sits behind my desk in my office during the workday, then getting lugged downstairs to the dining room table after work, then over to the couch in the evenings after dinner. It brims with goods and supplies and that I, a devoted paper person whose brain rarely shuts off, consider my essentials: planners, notebooks, a journal, pouches, pens, highlighters, stickies, a laptop, a Kindle, AirPods, more pens, the occasional tarot or oracle deck.
The idea of the house basket is one I borrowed from Brandi Kincaid who says of her own basket, “I feel a little like a crazy person who can’t live without her baskets, and yet, this is what keeps me sane: organizing the pieces into these containers so that I can move them throughout the house.”
I feel this, fully. And… for me there’s also something else wrapped up in the quirky house basket habit. Something a bit more medicinal.
I’ve found that I can be sitting at my desk or on the couch or standing in the kitchen minding my own business when suddenly, the winds inside me will change. The feeling arrives less like a loud crash, and more like a low hum: an incoming tide, equal parts agitated and urgent. Faint enough that I can almost miss it, but distracting and persistent nonetheless.
And after many years of experiencing this sensation in my body and either barely registering it or writing it off as ‘just part of being Type A’ I’ve finally come to understand its purpose:
It’s my body telling me there's something I NEED to offload, to work through, or simply to get down on paper. Now.
Humor me for a second: have you ever had to pee, but then it took a while to actually get to a restroom? (Stay with me... 😂) Maybe you were in the middle of something—an event, a phone call, a meeting—and the timing was inconvenient. Maybe you were in a car on a road trip with no choice but to wait until the next rest stop. Or maybe you barely even clocked those early nature calling sensations at all, because you were in the flow of working on something.
But as we all know, that feeling doesn’t just go away because we ignore it. In fact, it builds.
Once we’ve noticed it, it’s a bell we can’t un-ring—it grows more intrusive, more urgent, and more distracting the longer we delay. And as that pressure builds without a release valve, we become more tense, more restless, more distracted by the discomfort.
Trying to grasp and hold onto too many things at once in my mind feels like a similar type of uncomfortable, unrelenting pressure.
It generates a kind of static in both my physical and energetic body—a cacophony of buzzing, whooshing, crackling as too many thoughts crammed into a tight space slam into each other repeatedly with nowhere to go.
And so, making a habit of writing things down is less about a cute pen-and-paper pastime and more about giving myself the gift of a release valve. The gift of relief.
I used to barely register the gotta-write-it-down feeling at all. (As someone who moves through the world as somewhat of an anxious bunny, it's not uncommon for me to walk around feeling mildly uneasy much of the time.) Thankfully I’m hyper-attuned to the staticky sensation now. These days it takes me somewhere around 30 seconds to identify it, compulsively start feeling around with my hands for the closest notebook, and to mumble out loud:
“I gotta get this out.”
Lugging my house basket around my house is my way of making sure I’ll never be (figuratively) caught 60 miles from the nearest rest stop with a full bladder.
It’s my way of having tools at the ready, within arm’s reach for when something comes thundering through me, or an idea strikes, or the urgent clanging starts inside my head.
You never know when, in the middle of an episode of Seinfeld after dinner, there might be a list that demands to be jotted down, an insight that insists on being captured, a string of prose that arrives out of nowhere and threatens to flit away just as quickly into the ether.
And yet, the act of putting pen to paper and discharging all the static from my brain is about so much more than temporary relief.
Unfancy notemaking as a practice gives me a reliable lifeline back to myself.
In a world filled with noise and information overload, notemaking is how I hear my own voice.
It’s how I chronicle my real life.
How I document, observe, and make sense of my experience.
How I slow down to appreciate the beautiful aliveness of my creative mind.
How I remember not to believe everything my brain tells me.
How I interrupt the spirals and find my way back to center.
How I engage more deeply with my ideas.
How I create mental space.
How I stay connected to myself.
There’s something gorgeously ironic to me in that note making—a task that’s been undervalued and condescendingly delegated to women in the workplace for years—is the same activity that, when done of my own accord, plugs me directly into my power and transports me to solid ground.
When I make notes and heed my inner signals to reach for pen and paper, I find a portal to somewhere clearer: somewhere I feel more grounded, more like myself, more clear-headed and creatively engaged.
May our practices be anchors (and maybe even acts of rebellion) and our notes be breadcrumbs that lead us back to ourselves, again and again and again.
🤗 Delighting in
…the new-to-me game Connections from the NYT! I’m a devoted daily Wordler and I’ve had a Wordle group chat going with my extended family for at least a year now, but playing Connections and trading results with my mom is my new favorite daily ritual.
💭 Still Thinking About
This stunning essay from
’s Holly Whitaker about The Books I Wish Men Read.“This is not a ‘men are shit’ conversation. . . . All of the men in my life, and there are many, want muchly to heal, become aware, do good, be good, be better men. But I so often find that rape and assault, abortion, childcare, unpaid labor, etc. are issues seen as gendered, left to women to understand, navigate, and enact change. This was written not as an indictment of anyone, but as a wish, really, . . . That men might read the books we write and believe themselves to be included in the intended audience.”
Here’s a link to the full newsletter if you’d like to read it—and I highly recommend you do (though, please do take note of the content warning near the beginning).
🧪 Experimenting With
Readwise! Baby just bought her first-ever Kindle last week, and I love the idea of anything I highlight in the Kindle books I read being automatically forwarded to one tidy location inside my Notion system… which is exactly what Readwise does. Not just for Kinddle highlights—for things you highlight in articles online, PDFs, digital notes you take, etc. Still very much playing around and taking advantage of the free trial to see if I like it, but so far it feels promising.
✨ Weekly Dose of Internet Delight
Until next time,
Michelle