A nosy look in my notebooks

If I got stranded on a desert island and someone from Radio Four said I could choose one luxury (I think this happens to everyone at some point in their life, doesn't it?), I'd choose a thick notebook (and a pencil). Our house is bulging with my notebooks, I can't live without them... but what the bloody hell do I put in them?

Recently we cleared out the loft, and I was left with boxes of notebooks. After spending a whole morning having a nosy, I realised I had a bit of a notebook addiction. The sheer volume of them is ridiculous. Diaries since I was eleven, work diaries from 1998, sketch books galore, short stories, baby diaries, the infamous therapy notebooks, book journals, comics I'd drawn, French exercise books, recipe notebooks, and lots of half-filled books with just random thoughts in.

I began to wonder what the hell was going on. Do I have to write everything down in a book, and can I get rid of this messy legacy?

Here's just some of the notebooks I dug out, which I know I cannot get rid of...

Mawww look, they all look respectable and innocent don't they?
Open them up and you'll often find disgusting drawings of work colleagues in compromising situations, quotes from conversations that made me laugh, and notes on all sorts of things from lists of TV shows I need to watch, books I need to buy, and things I need to ask myself.

Hundreds of pages filled with scribbles, stories and drawings that make it pretty clear that I'm a born writer and an obsessive logger of all sorts of bits of life. 

There's years' worth of book reviews, and leafing through I'd forgotten I'd read half the bloody books. So it was good to see I'm well read...

I have school diaries which are so embarrassing my face contorts reading them...

I have written an entry in this book for every day of my daughter's life from zero to three years old. How I had the time I have no clue...

There's also the infamous therapy diaries, which I might be able to read when I'm 100 years old. A lot of them talk about how crap my therapist is (bless her we just weren't suited as you can tell here...)

And the short stories I write, which always make me laugh...

Plus, I have the cartoons I drew, before we had my daughter, and the ones I drew afterwards called Galloping Guinea Pigs...

The random doodles at the back of notebooks are my favourite though, they are so rude but I found this un-rude one, which I have no idea what it means...

So what do I put in my notebooks? Bloody everything!! My whole life is poured onto the pages for no reason, other than it's just the way I am.

I took a look at them and knew that I had to get rid of some of them. Old work diaries went in the bin-bag joyfully. I'll miss the drawings but it's not worth the loft space and I still have a million rude drawings. Half-filled notebook have been thrown away too unless there was something important inside them (no there never was). Recipes have been added to one notebook (I felt like a proper Mrs Woman doing that). The therapy journals have been hidden, the teenage diaries boxed up, the sketchbooks out and ready to be filled again, and the short story books have been piled up to be either typed up or thrown.

As I'm writing this I'm hyper-ventilating thinking that I've thrown away too much... I mean how am I going to know what I did at work in 2012, or on what date that person said that funny thing? Have I thrown away my fricking life! Does anything exist if it's not written down?

Ergh, excuse me, I just have to urgently go through the bins!!

If you are addicted to notebooks, please let me know. I'd love to hear what you put in your notebooks and if you'd ever throw them away.

Also, if you would like to commission me to draw one of my rude or not rude sketches, visit my Buy Me A Coffee page!