On feeling disconnected and the joy of writing on paper
...while being constantly connected through technology.
I love technology, but sometimes I feel so disconnected from the world around me. I have a job that I like but it keeps me in front of a screen for 8+ hours a day. When I started working in this company, I had decided to use a pretty notebook with my favourite pen to keep my tasks organized and take notes during meetings. But, sooner than expected, I have learnt that the amount of information and data to process was so high that I needed a quicker method to capture the constant stream reaching me every second. Multitasking is key in my job and a digital task manager + notebook (I use Microsoft To Do and OneNote, for all the app nerds out there) were the most suitable tools for the occasion.
Two and a half years in and I have cramps in my hand after writing only a few sentences with a pen on paper. When I journal, my brain often goes faster than the pen and my thoughts overlap making me feel confused about what I wanted to write in the first place. In my day to day life, I reach out for my phone for every quick note, my post-it block sits unused on my desk, I keep track of the books I want to read on my phone and, while I still refuse to dictate to whatever digital assistant out there, I still feel so disconnected, even if I am connected all the time, practically speaking.
My mom and I order our vegetables and fruit to a local farmer. We make a single order and then split the groceries according to our households needs. Some evenings ago, we were doing the usual calculations to know how much I had to give her, since she had anticipated the money for me as well. And for some reason, I paid attention to how she mindlessly reached out to a battered diary from 1988 with missing pages and torn edges and a random biro pen and did her calculations manually there in no time. On paper.
This moment kind of struck me as it brough me back to my childhood when her aunt, who was a farmer, scribbled her own calculations in a similar handwriting on a grid notepad on her kitchen table, before giving us her delicious harvest in the Summer. Flash-forward to my mom’s kitchen, I looked down at my hands. I was holding my phone, the calculator app open and the thought of putting all these numbers on an excel sheet to calculate more quickly lingering in the back of my head.
In that moment, my mom’s life felt easier and safer and cozy.
She didn’t think about grabbing her phone to do some simple math, no thoughts on the pen and the ink possibly bleeding though the page. She was writing in the wrong day of a diary almost 40 years old and making doodles while talking to me. Normally, I would have cringed at such messy pages, but that evening, I was transported back to my childhood and I thought that probably I just need more messy pages in my life. And scribble simple math on paper with a random pen.
I always try to spend less time on my own laptop during the weekends but I would like to also open my journal more and scribble and doodle and make marks and notes randomly, without worrying about creating pretty pages or aesthetically pleasing paragraphs. I want a messy handwriting like my great aunt and my mom, something screaming “hey it’s Alice writing here!” and not a print or cursive font that tries to show off saying “hey look at me, I’m pretty!” (the font, not me).
As I’m drafting this letter in my journal, my hand hurts and I have muscle cramps but it feels good. I was not distracted by notifications while I was recording these thoughts and my brain had also started to slow down a little, following the flow of my hand, rather than a frenetic type-speed of hands on the keyboard. My handwriting passed briefly from cursive to the strange mix of cursive and print that I had in school and I can see myself again.
I’m here, on this page, right now. I just needed a diary of 1988 and a basic biro pen to remind me of that.
Love this Alice, I wrote about disconnection too this morning. I do think technology is exacerbating the moments we feel disconnnected