I happened to take a lazy scroll on my notes app. Then, it hit me that I write more than I think I do. Writing has been my safe haven. In this note app there are staggered meeting minutes and a lot more personal notes. Journal entries, self-authored letters to ‘Future Leroy’ and a few decent attempts at draft code for shelved projects. It fascinates me how easily I’m able to steer my state of my ambitions and fears just by reading them. The potter isn’t any different from their stoneware which has their fingerprints all over. You can smell mischief, grief, or even staleness from a piece, even a badly written one—writing is revealing.

It sometimes strikes me how fast I fill my physical notebooks and I even acknowledge that in a few interviews I’ve given in the past. All my notes are epiphany sketches. They range from re-imagining system flows to chewing on sentences. “Find the best question for tomorrow’s brief” and “Be a little crazy.” I only go back to my notes for inspiration, after months or years when they’ve had time to brew. More than I admit, I practice what I write.

I picked this up from my 8.4.4 high school. You can only revise by way of writing notes. No other way. We were forced into the ‘ideal’ student’s way of revising, writing notes as a function of revision, to which none of us had the balls to object - whether the notes worked, who cared? Compliance was key for front-end survival anyway. But the back-end had a different story.

My teachers thought I was writing notes but I found it was much more interesting to have self-induced brainstorm sessions. So during evening sessions I would do what I thought was best—scribbling ideas while looking like I was revising. Because of this, I was revising according to the teacher and, by my definition, actually learning. It was liberating to outwit the fault of what was supposed to aid learning to something I actually enjoyed: note-taking writing.