'The'

I've got a fair few notebooks knocking about at home. Some have been waiting years for something important to happen inside them. Most turn up as gifts or during one of those phases when I decide, with zero proof whatsoever, that the only thing standing between me and a completely different life is the right notebook. They're often bought for the big stuff: brilliant ideas, profound thoughts, meticulous plans, and the things I absolutely mustn't forget, which I still do. I seem to like the idea of writing in them rather more than I like actually doing it, which is handy, given how little most of them have been asked to do. I also misplace a lot of them.

The other day, clearing out a drawer, I found one I hadn't clapped eyes on in about ten years. I knew it straight away: dark matte cover, a golden Bodhi tree, a faint grid of gold dots, and creamy, unlined pages inside. If you hadn't seen it before, it looked like it had already had several profound thoughts before you bought it. I picked it up in Thailand at the end of a solo trip, around March 2016, which was precisely the point in my life when a notebook like that was a very dangerous thing to put in my hands.

I even recall photographing it on the olive fabric of my shorts, an orange Stabilo pen across my lap. I know those details, because I found the photo. I posted it on Facebook with a little sermon about travel, tiny steps, reconnecting with my creative self, escaping the daily grind, and becoming a more fully realised human being, all before the plane had left Bangkok. The gist was that this was the first day of my new life. I hadn't looked for that post in ten years. My memory might have been doing me a favour.

The trip itself has stayed with me far better than the post. I remember the hiss of the street-food stalls, the market sellers, frangipani blossoms, temple bells in the morning. The heat hanging over the streets and, of course, my entire soaking being. I loved how the tuk-tuks hurled themselves through traffic, and I was completely distracted by the noise of it all, the colour, the conversations happening at full volume. It was gloriously, relentlessly too much—but then, Bangkok does that to everyone. I'd just never needed Bangkok to feel it. Some people's faces still come back to me as if they're right in front of me, and with them I remember how kind people were and how surprisingly easy it felt to travel alone.

There were stretches when I felt calmer than I had in ages, which is strange, given how much was coming at me. Being away from home, away from work, away from whatever version of myself I'd become without noticing, gave me a bit of distance from my life. I wouldn't say I saw clearly or wisely. But I did start to wonder if I'd just got used to a bunch of stuff I wasn't happy with.

I had a decent job back then, but the thought of flying home, plonking back down at the same desk and letting it swallow me whole again? Couldn't face it. I had no plan beyond that. I didn't know what was wrong or what needed to shift, but that has never stopped me getting fixated on changing something.

By the time I reached Bangkok airport, I was leaving somewhere I didn't want to leave, and the departure boards were counting down to the moment I'd be physically yanked out of it. Airports are rubbish places for perspective when you're in that headspace. With every minute, my vague feeling that something needed to change got more urgent, while everyone else carried on as if nothing demanded an immediate reckoning with their entire existence. They were finding gates, checking passports, buying sandwiches, managing tired children, or discovering a bottle of water where it absolutely shouldn't be. I was trying to solve the central problem of my life before boarding.

The airport wanted me on an Airbus A380. I was attempting to become a different person before the final call.

Naturally, a grand transformation required exquisite stationery.

I found a shop in the duty-free zone and bought the notebook. The pages were blank, with no lines, which felt significant at the time. My future thoughts couldn't possibly be expected to obey horizontal restrictions, could they? I wanted to capture what had happened to me before I got home and lost it, because I knew how fast that could happen. One minute you're alone in Thailand having a revelation about the very shape of your life. Seventy-two hours later you're in Tesco, staring at a frozen Goodfella's pizza, and the whole experience has the emotional reality of a film you once watched on a plane.

I imagined I'd fill it at the airport, then on the flight, or in the days after, before Thailand got swallowed by work and ordinary life. I'd jot down what I'd seen and thought, and maybe, just maybe, work out what on earth to do with any of it.

That was the plan, anyway.

Then I came home, and now ten years have passed.

When I found the notebook again, I went hunting for the Facebook post. There it was: the notebook on my lap, the orange pen, and underneath, my earnest account of how the trip had changed me. Reading it now, I remember how convinced I was that something fundamental had shifted. I also remember going back to work that week and colleagues asking whether the rumours were true, whether I'd actually handed in my notice. Word travels fast.

Which only made me more curious about what I'd actually written in this supposed repository for the next glorious phase of my existence.

So the other day, I finally opened it. At the top left of the first page, in small, neat black ink, was a single word.

The

I turned the page. Blank. Another. Blank. I flicked all the way to the back cover. No abandoned poem, no half-finished thought, no list, no tentative drawing. Whatever grand opus I'd imagined had got as far as a definite article and stopped. I burst out laughing.

And the more I thought about it, the more familiar the whole scenario felt.

New Year, New Me. Monday, I'm starting properly. After my birthday. After the holidays. September still feels like a golden opportunity to get your life together, even if you haven't been near a school in twenty years. Then there's the Sunday reset: clean the house till it gleams, change the sheets, meticulously prep the week's food, put it in Tupperware, and lob it into the abyss of the freezer. By Monday you're someone who has never, not once, left a mug beside the bed. And now there's the winter arc, where people spend the last three months of the year disappearing into the dark, sorting themselves out, and reappearing as a vastly improved, practically glowing person. Sounds glorious!

Humans are incredibly fond of finding these little borders in time and deciding that the idiot on one side of them has nothing to do with us.

There's even a name for some of this. It is called the fresh-start effect. The idea is that certain dates and new beginnings make it easier to believe we're starting again. Bangkok airport was hardly New Year's Day, but somewhere between departures and the gate, I'd decided I was going home different. This, apparently, was what meditating in a Buddhist temple in the hills of Chiang Mai had done to me.

And, of course, there was the Facebook post. I hadn't even started the full-time creative life I was dreaming of, but I'd already announced it. I'd even given myself a bit of a rebrand, a new dimension (was it the fourth by then, or had we hit the fifth?). These days I hear the same idea in "locking in", "ghost mode", vision boards, manifesting and "becoming the best version of yourself", which apparently also involves Pilates, a new skincare routine and getting up at five in the morning.

Oh, and drink more water, obviously.

I understand the appeal, because for a while after that announcement, I got to be the person who was going to do all those things. Announcing it felt almost as good as doing it would have. Almost. The actual doing could wait. I think I enjoyed that part far more than I realised at the time—which, when said out loud, is a fairly damning thing to know about yourself.

It's not as simple as "never tell anyone what you're going to do", which is advice I have never once taken in my life. Someone might encourage you, or ask how it's going, which is a pretty good reason to have told them. Unless, of course, you've vanished into your new era, entered the fifth dimension and updated your profile picture to prove you're thriving in there. Possibly the cover photo too, if the transformation is serious.

I think I did all of those things.

Maybe telling people wasn't the problem, though. I got home and there was work again: same desk, same routine, none of it remotely interested in what had happened to me in Bangkok.

The thing that makes me laugh now is that I bought that notebook because I genuinely thought I needed to write everything down before it slipped away. Then I barely wrote a word. And, surprisingly, I didn't lose it.

Not the trip, either. I'd spent years misplacing notebooks, phones, keys and entire afternoons, and the one thing I was terrified of losing was the thing that stayed.

How could I forget? By the end of that trip, I smelled so strongly of lemongrass and ginger that I felt less spiritually enlightened and more lightly marinated. But every time I get that scent, I remember how kind people were, how much I loved travelling alone, and how calm I felt, which was a pretty unfamiliar experience for me, to be honest. Right now, remembering that calm feels far more significant than it did at the time. It was the thing I'd been trying to buy with notebooks and announcements and new starts, and there it was, free, in the last week of a trip I hadn't expected anything from.

So, the notebook didn't preserve the trip the way I'd intended, which is hard to do with one word. But it did keep a snapshot of me: sitting in Bangkok airport, completely convinced something had shifted, armed with an orange pen and an earnest Facebook post. It's a beautiful, empty notebook, and I'd burdened it with far more responsibility than any notebook should have to carry.

A few years ago, I'd have glanced at it and thought, "There you go. Bought it to write in, wrote one word, never followed through. Classic me." Except now it's reappeared, I've spent days pondering it, and I've somehow written all of this about a notebook in which I got no further than "The".

It's a bit inconvenient, really, because now I have to rethink the whole damn thing.

Ten years later, I'm still not finished with the notebook. Although I did finally get past "The".

Which, I suppose, is one way to begin.