Writing Atop the Floorboards
Writing is my thinking partner.
It is a place I go throughout the day to remind myself I am still breathing. If you were to look in my home office, you would see shelves of Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. These are my tools of choice. The paper is high quality, the pages are numbered, lovely ribbons adorn to mark the day’s unfoldings, and the front includes a Table of Contents, making it easy to find things as the years pass and memories fade. They come in lines, dotted, or blank formatting. I vacillate between dotted or blank, but never lines, the artist in me just won’t accept such restrictions.
I am not, however, loyal to color - reds, blues, blacks, yellows, and oranges stake their claim on the shelves - each cover stamped with a sticker symbolizing an experience from the month before - there is the Colorado River, Wyoming’s Wilderness, and the Richmond Skyline to name just a few. Directly above the sticker, I write “Suskind” in a black permanent marker matched with the day’s date. I call my notebook a daybook, a nod to Don Murray, in his masterpiece, The Craft of Revision, he describes it this way.
“I call it a daybook because it is not a journal. When I called it a journal, I become pompous and laughed at what I had written with self-conscious self-importance. It is not a diary. I am far too well married. It is a writer’s log, a field book, a lab book, and a business account book. I chose “daybook” for its very ordinariness. It is not a literary book but a working notebook in which I keep account of my daily writing, record problems and solutions, new ideas, observation notes, quotes from writers, and, these days, sketches. It is also a place where I can paste things I want to reread, a place to make notes, draft titles, lists, lines, what I am talking to myself about.”
My daybook sits beside me in the morning to catch ideas floating around the paper, it gets tucked into my bag to snare future storylines from what others say and do, and it retires with me in the evenings - sipping up the remains of the day. I tape notes, movie tickets, and other remembrances into it - throwaway keepsakes of the week whose value increases exponentially as the decades pass. Just the other day, I thumbed through old pages to find my adult child’s pediatrician report, documenting his height and weight, measurements that have changed, and his idiosyncrasies, delightful nuances that have not.
If you are a current or past student of mine, you have a daybook too, for it is always a class requirement. Years later, students will reach out and share, that though they can’t necessarily remember the content of our classes, the daybook stuck.
People often equate a notebook habit with a form of documentation, but documentation is the act of recording what is. For me, the daybook is about figuring out what isn’t. When I write, I untangle what is bothering me, unearth the roots of a problem that appeared settled, and till the ground, readying it for new discoveries. I write not to show what I know but to figure out what I think.
Today, when I sit down with a soul seeking advice, one of the first things I will ask is, “Have you written about it for an audience of only you?” This question grows out of a belief that more often than not, we are the foremost authority on our own lives, but all the traffic and jumble of our everyday existence makes us discredit our own understandings.
Through writing, we slow down our lifeline just enough to walk back into ourselves and discover what is just below the floorboards if we were only to take the time to lift them up and see.
Two Read
This week, I am reading:
The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor's Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age by Gladys McGarey M.D.
Before We Were Innocent by Ella Berman
Favorite Quote
“Life reaches for life. Always. That means that when we feel the most stuck, whether physically, emotionally, situationally, or any other way, we need only to look for where things are still moving.”
― Gladys McGarey
Buy the Book
From the Publisher: Workplace Bullying: Finding Your Way to Big Tent Belonging is a lifeline for people who have been targets of workplace abuse and are desperately trying to make sense of the trauma. It is a resource for partners trying to help their loved ones heal. And, it is a toolkit for managers and industry leaders inspiring to create inclusive cultures by proactively addressing toxic behaviors that stagnate innovation, fracture work communities, and drive out top employees. To simplify a complex topic and make the book readable and engaging for a wide audience, the author uses the elements of story to tell the tale of workplace bullying, zooming in on the characters, settings, and plotlines of cultures that allow and/or encourage workplace abuse.
Purchase Through Rowman and Littlefield
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Participate in the Workplace Bullying Study
To deepen my understanding of the impact of workplace bullying on belonging, I have launched a follow-up study. To participate, please click this LINK. I have my university’s IRB approval to do this work.
Reach Out With Questions and Ideas
I love hearing from readers, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to say hello or suggest topics for me to write about next ~ dorothysuskind@gmail.com.