Looking Back to Write Forward
I marvel at the depth of minutes preserved over years. In some ways, I’ve always been writing a personal newsletter.
In 2016, after wrapping up my first year of university and midway into a summer internship, I started a daily journal habit I called QWERTY. Like the keyboard, it transcribed my thoughts onto a blank page. Unlike the keyboard, I wrote everything by hand. QWERTY framed my thoughts through an evolving acronym that has since settled on:
Q - Quote or question
W - What I’m up to
E - Explore (media in all its mediums)
R - Reimagine (a shift in perspective)
TY - Thank you (gratitude)
Even though there were days where I’d only make it halfway through or abandon the routine altogether, writing things out would remind me to slow down and sit with each sentence, lingering in my own presence.
For this purpose, I brought my squared Moleskine everywhere and in turn, it carried the words with its weathered but sturdy spine. I’d choose a coordinate for an inkling of an idea, placing it carefully between the grid lines, only to uproot it later with an arrow or strikethrough. In truth, I rarely know what I think until I write it down.
QWERTY is one of my favourite examples of path dependence—the power of history as fate and the paralysis in mistaking one for the other. While the AZERTY and Dvorak keyboards that came later were more efficient, it’s QWERTY that ingrained itself into the muscle memory of how we communicate. If future decisions are a doorway, the past is the hinge that broadens or limits our range of motion.
As I revisit past journals and notebooks, I marvel at the depth of minutes preserved over years and realize that in some ways, I’ve always been writing a personal newsletter. This difference is now, I’m writing in public. But not for the public. At the end of the day, I write daily for my past and present self, assembling everything here on occasion.
Perhaps influenced by my own path dependence, I still draw on and reshape QWERTY to distill my thoughts. Sometimes keeping the acronym in my writing, other times not, but always leaving traces that it’s been here.
Talk soon,
Christina