Field Notes

It is not a course and it does not go in order. The nine are rooms rather than steps: you open whichever one you need today, write in it, and come back to it next year, because none of these questions has a permanent answer. What you miss most at eight months is not what you miss most at four years.

In every section Willow answers one of the prompts herself, from inside the experience, before handing over the pen.

She is not a clinician. Field Notes does not diagnose anything and it is not therapy.

You would rather write than be asked. Something happens when the sentence has to be finished on paper.

You have five minutes and nothing to say. The first room is built for exactly that, and a page reading slept four hours, cried in the parking lot, do not know why is worth more in eighteen months than a page of insight.

You suspect you have moved and you cannot prove it. Every entry is dated on purpose, because change here is invisible from the inside and obvious in hindsight.

You already have the word and you want somewhere to put what comes after it.

You want the honest half of the ledger too: the relief, the ambivalence, on the same page as the grief and with no qualifier attached.

Who it is not for. If you are not safe, or if what you are carrying is heavier than a journal, a doctor or a crisis line is the right call today, and this will still be here afterwards. That is not a lesser option.

A print-optimized PDF with generous ruled writing space built into the pages: 738 ruled lines across nine sections, and fifty-three prompts to write against.

How to use this opens the journal in a page. Write badly and quickly. Date every entry. Skip a prompt you are not ready for and write down that you skipped it, because that is information too, and so is which ones you keep skipping. Do not try to do all nine.

The nine rooms.

Today, as it actually was is the engine, and the only room about the day you are in rather than the years around it.

An ordinary day, then asks for the woman you were on a Tuesday when nothing in particular was happening. Not the highlights. The texture.

The inventory is what went, what stayed, and what has come back. It is built to be re-run, because the third column is the one that moves.

What nobody mourned with me is the grief with no date, no ritual and no card.

The parts I'm not sorry about is the other column of the same ledger, and harder to write than the grief.

The qualifier is the tax charged on every honest sentence about this, and the question of who you are paying it to.

Not recognizing myself is the mirror, the name, the body, and the gap between who is being addressed and who is answering.

What I'd say if I could say it is four unsent letters: your partner, your mother, the friend who has no children, and your child in twenty years.

What's already true is the room for noticing you have turned. It is the only one whose answer is supposed to get longer.

The shape of every room is three parts and only those three. Willow says what the ground actually is. Then the prompts, each with room to write. Then her own answer to one of them. There is no fourth part, no practice to keep and no exercise to finish, because a journal with a completion state is a different product.

Buy it once, for US$39. Nothing renews, nothing expires, and there is no tier above it.

The journal arrives as a branded PDF in the files section of your account on members.willowreed.me. The ruled space is inside the file, so you can print it and write on it with a pen rather than being sent off to find a notebook of your own.

Open the room that is loudest this week. Date the entry. Come back in a month or in a year and write the new answer underneath the old one rather than over the top. Two lists a year apart are worth more than either one alone.

Nothing tracks you, nothing reminds you, and nothing is scored.