Filled with my deepest darkest secrets and my old grocery lists, my notes app is a catch all for the steam of consciousness in my mind.
Baby names, gift ideas, pros and cons lists of people i’ve dated, I’ve made my notes app the diary that I need in my most vulnerable of moments.
I have lists of jobs id want to explore, a list of the people i’ve kissed (first and last name) and things i’ve wanted to bring up in arguments with my mom. It’s more than just notes, it’s little snippets of me. It’s the things that when you add them all up it makes a life. The same way people have diaries, or photo albums.
I recently saw a movie clip where a woman asks: why do people get married? and the man responds with: because they are in love. She challenges him with the idea of having someone to bear witness to your life. If someone goes on through the world without being noticed or having others notice them; did they ever exist? not in a post everything on social media way, but in a if a tree falls in the forest does it make a sound way. if you go through life alone, whether by choice or by chance, its hard to prove that you’ve lived. That may be an idiotic and close minded thing to say, but i agree with it. The journey is only so great if you can share it with people. whether that be a partner, a child, a friend, a mother, the people in our life that bring us and we give happiness to are the witnesses in all the minutia of what seems to be an insignificant part of life. thats why we should take more pictures.
i’ve always wished my mom and dad had taken more pictures. I wish i had the plethora of knowledge about them that my future children will have of me. My kids will never see the end of me as a young person, when I have one or two photos of my dad as a kid and maybe a handful of my mom. The future generations are so lucky to be able to have a whole backlog of the things their ancestors thought, said, wrote, photographed, etc. It’s such a special gift that I wish I had. Imagine knowing what your great grandparents did for fun in the 1850s- like what??
I digress. I have a profound love for my notes app and the random things I write in it (this being one of them) and I look forward to the multitude of notes app confessions in the future.
The question is, what’s in your notes app?
It seemed like my notes were becoming a black hole of snippets of my past (with topics not so different from yours), so I decided to stop using it. I was under the impression of "if no one ever sees it, why is it important". And while there's definitely personal benefit, I just still stopped using it a while back.
What I really wanted to share tho is that the point you made about how much we know about our family as kids is really important. It's not just that kids these days have more information in general available to them, but the information about the elders in their family probably has a bigger influence on how kids feel abou…