My Notes app is sacred and insane

Girls, you couldn't waterboard some of that stuff out of me.

If you’re anything like me, your Notes app is full of jump scares and wistful past lives you don’t really recognise.

Are you really a girl if you don’t open your notes and shudder?

Mine is mostly full of things you couldn’t waterboard out of me.

I’ve written thousands of words on the internet over the last decade, and I’m acutely aware that every single one lives forever. I will never forget the day I exposed the abuse of a sociopath to the world when I used my pen for revenge (it was not the first or the last time, to be clear). My casual admissions to the world are burned in my brain, like the time I wrote about getting fired because I broke my ankle, or the sprawling streams of consciousness from the delusional and emotional depths of my 2019. There’s plenty out there to remind me that all of this exists forever, and it lives longer than I do - if anyone tries to find it, that is. Please don’t try to find it, I beg.

Even so, I have so much more to hide and it all lives in my hand.

Specifically, it lives in my phone and the best and worst of me floats around in the sacred, private chambers of my Notes app. Don’t get all excited, I’m not about to hand them over now. There’s no way anyone is getting the contents of my Notes app from me, not even if they bribe me (and I am a woman who can usually be bought or persuaded by something as simple as a croissant). These are the thoughts I’ll never put up for sale, as I’d be lucky if I had a friend or morsel of sanity left behind.

It’s all so embarrassing in there, like a fun house of sedated, quiet clowns. It’s busy with mental illness and things I’ll never admit, like how distorted I look in my mirrors and the names of people I’ve loved before. I can’t even think about it for too long without wanting to strangle myself with my hair. Whenever death comes for me, I hope I get a nudge in the side from it before it’s too late. If it’s kind to me, it’ll remind me that I need to clean out my Notes app, for everyone’s own good. But mostly mine, I must admit. I won’t be able to explain it all away when I’m dead, after all.

Most of us seem to use our Notes app in the same way, compiling messy anthologies of clunky sentences, grocery lists and passwords. Sometimes it’s senseless, sometimes it’s poetry. It’s full of deadlines, pin numbers, pleas and pardons. Sometimes a secret promise or two, if we’re feeling generous or sentimental.

My Instagram is often full of screenshots of someone’s Notes app, and this is how I know we all use it exactly the same way. I’m sure there are plenty of people who take the time to organise it (not me), but my point stands that we all use it for the same thing. It’s quite simple really, it’s just chaos. Don’t you love the mess?

We use it to tell the truth without hearing the tremble in our throats, and we use it to leak heartbreak and other nonsense from our fingertips without editing. We use it to keep personal information safe and filed away other boring stuff like lists and budgets. My Notes app is my digital version of the “shit cupboard” in my apartment. I don’t know half of what’s in there, but if I need something then that’s where I’ll probably find it. If in doubt, check the shit cupboard.

If I’m in bed and too far away from pen and paper, I might use it to journal some fleeting, unimportant musings. I might use it when I’m tapping into nostalgia, trying to piece together a supercut of my past lives.

When I scroll through my notes, it smells like cedar and cigarette smoke, it screams drunk admissions of guilt and whispers doomed prophecies. The latter are usually my dreams. I don’t usually remember many of them so I take it seriously when one sticks around in my brain after I’ve brushed my teeth and washed my face.

There was one time that I woke up in the middle of the night by one of my prophecies. I’d had a dream where I was walking through a pub with my (then) boyfriend in the middle of winter, coming face to face with the girl from his phone before he kissed me goodbye and said he’d see me at home. I wrote it down when it woke me up at 4.30am and the exact scenario played itself out a couple of months later. Sometimes prophecies look a lot like paranoia in disguise, so try not to ignore them. Write them down, even if they don’t make sense in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I use my Notes app to formulate arguments against my enemies (colleagues, ex boyfriends, demons), or practice my closing statement for my next big meeting with my boss. That’ll show them.

We’re all just girls, taking on the world with our mess.

Excerpts from the journals of Sylvia Plath make their way into my notes sometimes, and I think about how I would feel if someone got their hands on my phone or worse still, my leaning tower of worn out notebooks.

Truthfully, I’d rather chew off my own arm than put those out into the world. I don’t even let my best friend see my notebooks, covering my pages with my hand like a teenager sitting a very important, life altering test. It’s not just because the content itself is sometimes nothing and sometimes something, but because it tells the truth, my words are messy and that itself would kill me in every afterlife to come.

Nothing about my notebooks is polished or controlled. I get too anxious to let anyone see what’s inside of them. My handwriting becomes a spidery scrawl when I’m upset, so please don’t look at my smudges. My real thoughts are too insecure for you to see, so could you please look away for a second while I pull myself apart? I’m so sorry about the mess, please don’t judge me. Don’t look, it’s not ready yet.

Ever a sentimental woman and curator of memories, I make notes of gifts to buy, funny things my friends have said, or stories I need to tell. I’ve got hundreds of unorganised notes, each cluttered with fragments from my soul and gut. I’ve written the most embarrassing, melodramatic things of my life in that app.

But not as embarrassing as what’s in my notebooks.

I buy so many notebooks and I even buy special, expensive ones for my “best work”. You probably do this too. In case you haven’t guessed, the special ones have remained untouched. I have one that’s almost a decade old, gifted by one of my best friends. She bought it in St Augustine and I held it close on the plane home, quietly promising it would be used for my greatest, most interesting thoughts.

I’ve been sitting here for a long time, almost great and almost interesting. I’ve been almost ready to use it so many times.

It sits on my shelf all these years later, all blue and unwritten.

The notebooks I do use are cheap and chaotic and I think this is because I feel free to make a mess of them. There’s no pressure from a £3 supermarket notebook. There are some buried in my bookcase and forgotten in old handbags. There’s a stack of them under the coffee table, one in my office tote and one on my lap. They are usually home to the saddest and most peculiar of my thoughts, painfully raw like a fresh pink graze on my knee. I read my notebooks sometimes and wince. You poor thing, too bad you can’t kiss this one better. I scowl at myself. Then I rip the heart right out of it, and use my laptop to turn it into something longer, something more.

With my notebooks, they are all quite similar to my Notes app in the sense that I have no method. I do not overthink it, I just pop things in and swipe it away or start a new page before I can punish myself for being too self absorbed or verbose. I do not clean up or water down (that’s a job for Google Docs). I just write what comes out and sometimes it’s borderline insane. Sometimes I make myself laugh.

They are full of everything and nothing, scattered with vanilla observations and unhinged inner monologue. They are daydreams and night terrors, secrets and questions. They stay unremarkable to me, but they might be tiny fragments of art if I squint a bit. Words turn lyrical when my muses push their way inside and I sketch eyes with smudged eyeliner. Whenever I draw eyes, they’re crying. Yeah guys I get it, I am insufferable, it’s just more fun to draw a bleeding cat eye, okay? I doodle cupid’s bows of lips I know, perfect curved arches stamped from my memory. I curl swirls around my margins and scatter stars around the best parts. There are black, dead patches of ink where I’ve crossed and scribbled out the worst of me.

If you ever need a way to knock yourself down a peg or two, crack open an old journal or a note from 2018. You’ll find yourself humbled real quick.

I mentioned that sometimes I feel a little self absorbed, and I guess at times I can be. I would hope that the people I love would back me up and say I often put everyone else’s needs before my own, so it makes sense that my writing is the one selfish thing I have. That’s all very nice and all but if I notice too much self absorption in my Notes app and notebooks then it always shakes awake my shame. It makes me feel so guilty. Am I really this insufferable? (Yes, we’ve figured that one out already).

A girl’s notes app is holy, undiscovered ground. It’s rocky and you might need to watch your step as you make your way through. We’ve all got a lot of the same bones hidden under there, rotted remains of relationships and generational trauma buried beneath the dirt and the dust. We share these same experiences, but our bones tell slightly different stories. We all have so many things to say, and they’re all buried in our Notes app, along with the chai cookie recipes and text messages we’re too afraid to send.

It’s all just so embarrassing.

All we can do is laugh sometimes, or give ourselves an awkward, compassionate pat on the shoulder if we feel a little sorry for ourselves. Take a look in your Notes app, and rip the heart out of its chest. Make something out of all the embarrassing things you’ve written down in there. After all, it’s all just plot.