Riley brought out a notebook she’d bought for garden ideas. There was nothing in it, which she said was the problem.
If you want to read the story first, you can read it here: Before We Call It Writing
By the end of the evening, the five women admitted to their abandoned notes.
Skylar called her old field notes “field notes,” not writing. Val talked about her old habit “lists.” Raven didn’t call it anything. She just said she kept records. Quinn said she used to carry a small notebook when she traveled, and when Riley asked what happened to it, she said simply, “I stopped carrying it.”
What struck me, watching this unfold as I wrote it, wasn’t the writing itself. It was how every one of them described what she used to do before this notebook arrived.
I noticed something after the chapter was finished. None of them described stopping as a loss. Not one of them grieved it.
Raven is the one I keep coming back to. As they passed Riley’s notebook around, she refuses it outright, twice. But then she admits she used to write down what the horses taught her. “I forgot about those,” she says. Not I stopped. Or I gave it up. Forgot. As if forgetting were the gentler story to tell herself.
Quinn does something quieter but just as telling. She doesn’t claim to have forgotten anything. She remembers exactly what she used to notice. The light on the water, a red scarf caught on a chair, a woman at an airport who looked relieved to be leaving. She just stopped carrying the notebook.
No drama in the sentence. No regret attached to it. Just a fact, stated the way she’d state any other fact, and the conversation moves on without anyone, including Quinn, treating it as something worth mourning.
That made me wonder how often we stop doing something that mattered without ever naming it as a loss.
Because if we don’t think something is missing, we don’t go looking for it.
Riley didn’t intend to write the sentence that gave this piece its title.
Before We Call It Writing
She thought the notebook was empty. It wasn’t empty. It had just been waiting for the right hour and the right women in the room.
I think a lot of us are carrying a version of Raven’s “I forgot,” or Quinn’s “I stopped carrying it.”
Not a dramatic ending to something that mattered. Just a slow erosion nobody marked. The notebook goes in a drawer instead of the trash. The habit doesn’t end, it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore. And because nothing was ever declared lost, there’s no occasion to go looking for it again.
Maybe the question isn’t, “Am I a writer?”
Maybe the better place to begin is, “What have I already been saving without knowing why?”
I’ll be writing more soon about why so many women don’t need a writing class right now .
Sometimes what we need first is clarity.
If this brings something to mind, I’d love to hear about it. Reply or comment on this post and tell me what came up.
What’s hidden in your drawers?
Life’s Threads are written from the Women of the Canyon, five women whose stories reflect the questions we still ask ourselves.
Marylee, this made me think about how rarely we notice the things we've quietly set down over the years. We don't always lose them. Sometimes we just stop picking them up.
If I interpret what you are saying correctly, there are things I’ve tried but needed an end goal. Writing just to write needed a result so it turned into blogs. I have a desire to “create art” but I need a why because just coloring or drawing is boring as is learning or practicing with no goal in sight.
Why we don’t need a writing class will be posted next week! Thanks for reading and commenting, ie. writing, Ellen.