Morning Pages

I would have forgotten so much of my life if it hadn’t been for my practice of doing Morning Pages. 

I just spent 2 weeks re-reading everything from 2024 and came up with four —I don’t know what to call them exactly—Themes?  Obsessions? 

Basically the stuff that absorbed me and was my life this past year.

Those four things were:

• My trip to Paris for the weekend to see the Rothko Exhibit.
• My eye surgeries, including both eyes for cataracts and a vitrectomy to get rid of that big floater.
• Searching on Zillow to try to find Emily a house.
• And my newfound obsession with clothes and style, which, on the surface, seems like a silly thing to spend time on, but has given me some profound insights on communicating and signaling with clothes. 

But without those morning notebooks, I would have forgotten most of my life. 

Without those notebooks, I might have remembered that I went to Paris, but not all the excitement and fear and trepidation that led up to booking that trip and actually flying off to France.

In those Morning pages I chronicled my shifting moods as I lived them, inking words in purple fountain pen ink, page after  page, while sipping coffee as Rookie cozily snored at my elbow.

This is the first year I’ve ever done a year-end review like this. I read everything and am now going into this year with a clear sense of how I came to be at this moment. Without Morning Pages this would not have been possible.

This afternoon, for fun, I reread all these WordPress posts from the past year. Writing these weekly posts is very different from writing Morning Pages. Morning Pages are pure stream of consciousness, whereas these posts are more focused and crafted.

But like Morning Pages, I still never really know what will happen here when I begin.  I often change everything two or three times before I hit Publish. I always think these posts are sooo boring, and question why I persist, but yet I do. It’s like a sick compulsion. It’s like a job nobody hired me to do but I feel I have to do it anyway. 

Today I searched for the posts that got the most Likes and Comments, and found that I often didn’t like the ones you liked the best.  

The post that got the most likes from you last year was one called, I’ve Got Something To Celebrate. It was about how I hadn’t skipped a week here for a year and how I was ready to leave WordPress and decamp to Substack. That one got 9 Likes. 

*I’m still dragging my heels on my move to Substack because of my perfectionist tendencies, but that’s a post for another day.

When I reread it, the post I liked best was from January 4 of last year called, You Are Where You Shop. It was about what happens when you go into a store and find your old child self again, the one who used to love art supplies, books, musical instruments, or pens and could happily roam that store for hours, reliving those old dreams.

I also liked Nothing to Wear from April 25 and Capsule Wardrobe, Capsule Life from August 8, about how I started being intentional about my clothes and how creating outfits made me feel creative and aware of how clothes signal.

I think the point of this post is just to pay homage to, and encourage everyone to try Morning Pages. If you don’t know what they are, it’s a Julia Cameron thing from her book, The Artist’s Way. Morning Pages are three pages of handwritten stream-of-consciousness writing you do first thing in the morning. They don’t have to conform to any grammatical standards. They’re a brain dump, that’s all.  And for me, without them, this blog wouldn’t exist, and I would have very little memory of how I live my life from day to day, month to month, or year to year.