Writing

Full disclosure: I’m a writing addict. I didn’t realize it for most of my life — not until one quiet afternoon when I started counting the number of Moleskine journals I’d filled over the years. They were everywhere. On shelves. In drawers. In bags I hadn’t used in years. A small army of black notebooks, each one holding a version of me I’d forgotten about. You know the ones I mean: the iconic matte‑black covers, the elastic band that eventually loosens with age, the ribbon bookmark that frays just enough to feel lived‑in. And of course, the little paper pocket in the back — the one that always ends up holding ticket stubs, receipts, and scraps of ideas that never made it to the page. Every new Moleskine comes with that tiny booklet tucked inside, the one that whispers: *Hemingway used notebooks like this. Chatwin used notebooks like this. Picasso used notebooks like this.* It’s pure marketing, but it works. When I open a fresh Moleskine, I feel like I’m tapping into a lineage — as if the simple act of putting pen to paper connects me to a century of restless thinkers, artists, and wanderers. I use other notebooks too, but there’s something about the Moleskine mythology — and yes, the inflated price of dead tree skin — that makes me want to write more. We’re all allowed our heroes. My favourite journal‑keeper of all time is Jean‑Michel Basquiat. He didn’t need fancy notebooks; he used Mead composition books, the kind you’d buy for a high‑school English class. And yet what he wrote and sketched in them was electric. Genius-level. A compendium of his journals was published recently, and flipping through it feels like watching a mind ignite in real time. But writing by hand today feels almost rebellious. We live in a world of screens — phones, laptops, tablets — and most writing happens on glowing rectangles. I write on screens constantly. I’ve been lucky: I was exposed to computers early. My godmother, a gifted writer herself, worked at Microsoft and made sure all her nieces and nephews had access to hardware and software long before most kids did. My first real dive into computing was on a beige Macintosh — the kind with the built‑in monochrome monitor, the clacky keyboard, and the single‑button mouse that felt like a design statement. It had a 3.5‑inch floppy drive, which meant I could copy files, install programs, and feel like a tiny digital engineer. Printers were a luxury back then, but somehow I had one. And that Mac had a handle on top, which was perfect because I spent much of my early life in cramped apartments and needed to move it around constantly. That computer wasn’t just a machine — it was a companion. Writing back then wasn’t an escape. It wasn’t therapy. It wasn’t ambition. I just loved it. I typed random things every day — stories, lists, thoughts, nonsense. And because of my godmother, I had access to all kinds of word‑processing software. I started with Microsoft Works, then graduated to Microsoft Word, and Word changed everything. I wrote almost every high‑school and university essay in it. There was another program, WordPerfect, beloved by lawyers. I tried it. It had that big blue minimalist screen — sleek in its own way — but it wasn’t Word. And by then, I was already hooked. And remember: none of this came from the internet. These programs lived on stacks of 3.5‑inch floppy disks. Installing them took 15 to 30 minutes, and you prayed the last disk didn’t fail. There was a ritual to it — a patience that doesn’t exist anymore. Somewhere in all of that — the notebooks, the Macs, the floppies, the essays, the cramped apartments, the mythology of writers I admired — I fell in love with writing. Not the idea of being a writer, but the act itself. The quiet thrill of turning thoughts into something tangible. The feeling of watching a blank page become a place. And honestly? I don’t think I ever stopped chasing that feeling.