Reading · The Lovely Brains Newsletter

I saw a Substack tweet promising an essay on revenge bedtime procrastination, and I shrunk inside. Even though I know the term, the author reminded me that there’s always another habit to track and feel guilty for.

Maybe this has always been a feature of the way humans process, but, egged on by Internet culture, the thing-ification of the human experience seems to be spreading. We have acronyms for everything. Everything is a phenomenon to be noticed. Every thinkpiece becomes a moral referendum on our way of living.

We truly have an astounding amount of information about how humans tick that it’s bewildering to keep track of, and more and more it feels like our survival depends on it. At least that’s how it’s felt for me. I’ve spent the past 10 years scouring the Internet for solutions to my TBI and other health issues, and I have learned an incredible amount in the process. The Internet saved my life—gave me access, while bedbound and then housebound, to the experiences of people going through what I was and offered education I couldn’t get in a doctor’s office.

Each layer of education and unfolding self-understanding has been vital to being able to untangle what exactly is going on for me. Still, I am seeking my rhythm. No doubt I’m making things too complicated. I am basically a plant that needs food and sunlight and a little sensory play. All this therapeutic information I struggle to coordinate is in some sense quite optional compared with time connected to the earth under the sun. Even though I love information, I need to get out of my head. Draw. Stitch. Sunbathe. Maybe the best I can do creatively right now is collect interesting scraps that don’t hang together fully yet while I wait for the healing picture to come together.

I hope to heal some more. I hope I will be able to help my body get all the nutrients, movement, sunlight, stimulation, and rest that I need to feel my best. I hope I’ll get the neurorehab I still need to fix lingering biomechanical challenges. And I’m trying to make room for the mess and the desire and the bewilderment of being a human who has no idea how to make any of this work for her. I am releasing my grip somewhat, and I want to melt more and more into my self—what she wants and what she can sustain. That leads me to this next creative phase.

I don’t think scrapbooks will ever go out of style. As long as humans are around, we’ll collect whatever we find interesting and put it together someplace—to keep special items safe, to preserve memories, to commemorate ideas, to essentially put a little pin down on the map of life and say, “I was here. Here’s my ticket stub to that play I really liked,” a paper moment in time affixed with glue and a caption in sparkly gel pen ink.

Scrapbooking emerged in my teen years as a way to hold the meaning of my life. A few years ago I got into junk journaling to satisfy my need to gather and pin down colors and textures. This time I’m making my scrap book digital.* My raven beak likes pieces of tinsel, and Scrap Books honors that. Scrap Books is a series where I’ll share what I’m creating and thinking about in a way that feels nonpressured to me. I really have felt so scared to create anything that wasn’t a craft for the last couple of years, and I am trying to break out of that and perhaps encourage more healing through creation.

In light of my anti-thingification bent, I recognize the irony of the fact that I am creating a thing to organize my creative impulses. Scrap Books is, I hope, a therapeutic a way to focus my attention and give me permission to share anything I want, even if it doesn’t all hang together just right. I want to use it as a low stakes way to get me back into writing and sharing what I’m working on. I want to feel intrigued again. I want to be so tantalized by the thread in the labyrinth that I don’t want to stop following it. Above all, I hereby relieve myself of having an answer and revert to my true identity as a collector of interesting items.

I hope you’ll join along in scrap booking your life this year. I’m here to honor the process of snipping and stitching, tearing up and starting again. I hope you’ll share what you’re doing, documenting, and making this year and make it scrap book official. The small pieces belong, too. “Trifles make the sum of life,” says Charles Dickens! See you in the scrap box.