Margins

I have a notebook addiction. On top of that, I can’t finish a notebook, because when I buy a new one, I am excited to use it, and move on to that one. Sometimes, I start notebooks for specific purposes (Ideas for stories, Undelivered letters [to myself or others], etc.) and I would get tired of it, run out of things to write, and/or forget the purpose of the notebook was, originally.

Point is, I have a bad habit when using notebooks. I also have a bad habit of writing without margins. I love blank notebooks. I also love dotted and grid notebooks. Alright, I like lined notebooks too. I like non-white papers (specifically cream-colored papers and kraft/brown papers). Basically, I like most notebooks, but I never really liked those with a margin.

I never figured out how to use margins properly. I suck at annotating. I also suck at highlighting just the important texts, underlining, or whatever people with good studying and annotation habits do. I tend to color the whole page with highlighters (especially when STABILO released their pastel-colored highlighters).

Whenever I set up my bullet journal layouts, I look at minimalist layout inspirations, but for some reason, it always comes out wrong.

Because my notebooks rarely have breathing space or margins.

I remembered, I once searched for good note-taking methods when I was still in school. I wanted to make my notes prettier and more effective because I always take notes, but I find it hard to study my notes because they are just one big chunk of text.

One of those note-taking methods was the Cornell Method. It has margins on one (or was it both sides?) and a section below for notes. YouTube also taught me variations of the Cornell method. One has only one margin on the left side, without the space for notes below. I also tried the mind-mapping thing, but it didn’t work out.

Because I never figured out how to write with breathing space.

For some reason, I have this irrational feeling that I will run out of pages, so I try to make my writing as small as I could, and as cramped as I could. I would try bullet points instead of sentences, and I only ended up with bulleted sentences. And the margins. Oh, the margins frustrate me. I always felt like they were a waste of perfectly good writing space.

Today, at work, I was listening to a podcast. The guest said she interviewed a doctor in Sweden about burnout, and people nowadays try to live out their (our, me included) lives writing from edge to edge of the pages, metaphorically speaking.

We plan our days to the minute and pack them with a lot of activities, from edge to edge, edge to edge, disregarding the margins, so whenever we want to make changes, reflect and annotate, or make notes, we no longer have room left for those things that are important if we want to take stock of our lives and how we live our time. We also leave no room for us to breathe and rest and make changes.

We are afraid of uncertainty, not just because it is anxiety-inducing to not know what happens next, but because changes mean disrupted plans and losing control.

So we burn out.

I noticed it recently in my bout of bullet journaling this year. I think I am being productive, but for some reason, I feel like I can’t breathe. I don’t feel in control. Whenever I look at my bullet journal, I feel panicky, and this dread over how limited time is starts haunting me.

I always feel like I don’t have enough when really, I’m just cramming too much into a single page.

Just as I want to let my notebooks breathe with space, I need to let myself breathe with enough rest time. Funnily enough, “Breathe” was the word of the year I chose for myself. And yet, I am still having trouble “breathing.”

I need to learn how to draw margins and respect those margins–both in my life and in my notebooks. I need to respect the fact that time is limited, but it is the same for everybody else, and I am not the only one with goals to achieve, and things to do.

But I only have one body, one mind, and one “me” to deal with, and “me” says I need to give myself room to breathe. Room to rest. Room to grow. Room to re-calibrate, so that when life happens and ruins all my plans, I can get frustrated for a second, breathe deeply (several times), and move on. I need enough room to accommodate whatever shit life decides to throw at me.

I need to be more firm with my “no’s” and be more strict with my procrastination.

Otherwise, I would fall off the page again, and I am at that point in my life where I really don’t want that to happen unless I have done all I could and it still wasn’t enough. (Because sometimes shit happens, and other times SHIT happens. Like the really big, ugly, hard, and stinky kind.)

Draw your margins, write within the page, leave room for rest, and space to reflect or edit stuff, because life is full of surprises, and in order to regain control over the unexpected stuff, we need to let go of control over the everyday minutiae stuff (Backwards Law/Law of Reversed Effort). Like seriously. Chill out, me. And maybe, chill out, you?