"I'm afraid…" doesn't ask you for anything

Most of the journals I have owned have fallen into one of two categories.

The first category has expectations and tends to ask or request things from me. What are three things you are grateful for? Write down five things you did well this week. What is one thing you want to manifest this month? The questions and requests arrive quite helpfully, almost as if I had bought a journal in order to be interviewed by it.

The second category is the opposite. No prompts, no structure, just blank pages as far as the eye can see. I have a complicated relationship with the blank journal. On a calm day, in a calm season, it is beautiful and elegant. But on other days, it evokes a kind of paralysis because I find myself with ten thoughts circling my head, none of them holding still long enough to be the first thing on the page. I am sitting there with absolutely no adult supervision, a pen in my hand, and I suddenly become aware of the laundry, the email I forgot, the 20 WhatsApps I still have not answered, and the fact that apparently even my feelings now require project management.

The blank page waits, serene and unbothered, like it has never once had a vague sense of doom. And the longer it waits, the larger the silence becomes, until eventually I close the journal and decide to "deal with it tomorrow", which is a very ambitious phrase and should honestly be used with caution.

Both kinds of journals, in their own way, ask something of you before they will hold anything for you.

The asking journal wants you to answer its question. Are you grateful? What for? List them. So now, before you can be honest, you are translating whatever you arrived with into something the journal will accept. 'Wait, am I grateful? Am I supposed to be grateful right now? What does that even mean today?' Two or three steps before the page lets you in.

The blank journal wants you to choose. Of all the things in your head, which one goes first? Which is the real one, the important one, the honest one? You have to interview yourself before you can put a single word down. Two or three steps, again, before the page lets you in.

One asks you to become answerable. The other asks you to become articulate. And some days, honestly, I am neither.

So I knew I needed to build a different kind of journal page for myself and others like me.

Inside a Note from Stella's Daughter, you will find pages called “Thoughts”. These pages do not ask anything of you, they also do not leave you alone with the void. They begin with an unfinished line, just a fragment, and then they stop. They hand the rest of the page to you.

"I'm afraid…"

or

"I keep remembering…"

or

"What makes me angry is…"

The fragment is not a question and it does not interrogate you. It is a recognition, a small one, maybe, but I have built an entire world around the relief of being recognised without being asked to explain yourself first, so clearly I have chosen my hill and decorated it.

It says, 'I know one of the thoughts circling in your head right now is some version of this, so let us begin there before your brain opens a full internal working group with no chairperson, no minutes, and three conflicting action items'.

You do not have to choose the perfect thought. You do not have to translate yourself into the journal's preferred emotional format. You can recognise the thread, like reading your internal weather, and pull whatever comes.

And there is something special that happens when you read a fragment that recognises you. With "I'm afraid…" you do not pause to ask yourself whether you are afraid. You think, 'yes, oh my goodness yes, I am afraid, I am afraid of this, the little menace has been circling the room all morning.'

The Thought was already there. The page just plucked one of them out of the swirl and offered you a place to put it down.

The rest of the page is yours. You finish the sentence, or you do not. You write one word or five pages, or you say 'no, I'm not really afraid' and open another page that says "I miss …".

And here is the thing that makes my spine tingle every time I think about it.

"I'm afraid…" doesn't ask you for anything.

You can open that page and write 'I'm afraid of spiders', or you can come back to it and write 'I'm afraid my life is falling apart'. The page does not ask which one you meant. It does not ask whether one fear is serious enough, mature enough, dramatic enough, healed enough, or worthy of stationery. It does not ask anything at all. It just holds whatever arrives.

This is what pages that recognise you, and hold you, make possible.

Stella's Daughter is not a place that helps you get through something. It is a place that holds you while you are in it. We are building a journal for the exhaustion of living between languages, countries, cultures and versions of yourself. A journal for the grief that does not come with a funeral because what you lost was never officially yours. A journal for the stretch where life is not dramatic enough for sympathy, but still feels wrong in your hands.

None of them will ask you for anything either.

"I miss …" doesn't ask. "I didn't get to say..." doesn't ask. "I'm tired of…" doesn't ask.

They only recognise what already exists when you get there.