On The Economy of Words
At my grandparents’ townhouse in Gillette, the journals were still stacked neatly on a bookshelf. After my grandmother died, we packed them into oversized plastic containers, shoved them into the back of my care, and I drove them home. In the disorientation of grief, I began reading immediately, searching for a connection with the women I had just lost. At the time, I was enrolled in a ‘Writing the Novel’ seminar, and if pain demanded meaning, maybe I could write it into form.
The journals refused that assignment.
What I found in those journals was less about loss than about living. She wrote unevenly, without consistency, recording what mattered in the moment: the morning temperatures, the wind shifting west, a cat curled in her lap. Sometimes nothing other than one line: Busy. But I am here.
Her pages complicated what I thought writing was supposed to be. Collegiate writing had trained me to believe that writing required rigor, sustained output, words published for critique. A novel draft by semester’s end, a workshop packet defended in discussion. Blankness, in that context, was failure. Silence was laziness. My professors’ invisible red pens still hovered over every page.
Yet here was a life rendered in fragments, a story told through presence and absence alike, and the gaps mattered just as much as the words.
Meanwhile, my own notebooks pile in the closet. A floral one holds only a grocery list: milk, eggs, mascara. A black leather journal waits for a novel I haven’t started yet. A pastel planner documents exactly one week before disappearing into the backset of my care, its calendar frozen mid-March 2023. They lean against the wall like fragile architecture, threatening collapse when I reach for a sweater. Even now, I let them accuse me.
When I place these empty notebooks beside my grandmother’s journals, I realize they tell a different story. Her volumes prove that writing can live in fragments. My blank notebooks prove that I had not abandoned the possibility. Both speak to the same impulse: to record a life, even if the record remains uneven.’
This realization collides daily with my professional life. As a grant writer, I produce words for measurable ends. A blank page is not metaphorical; it’s a liability. If I miss a deadline, funding disappears. If my sentences fail to persuade, a hospital doesn’t receive new equipment. My job requires me to convert narrative into currency. Every paragraph must justify itself; every word must serve a deliverable. It’s writing that carries consequence, and I respect it deeply. It pays attention to systems and communities in ways that matter.
When I turn to my own notebooks, I hesitate to call myself a writer. The pages remain blank or half-filled, and I convince myself that real writers would have already produced something lasting. I write constantly for others, but when it comes to writing for myself, I falter. The truth is that I feel like an imposter, a person surrounded by words but unsure if any of them belong to me.
My grandma’s journals remind me otherwise. The line that lingers most in my mind, Wind from the west. Smells like rain, would never satisfy a federal reviewer, yet it carries an entire day. It arrests the fleeting and insists it matters. It testifies to attention, which is perhaps the oldest reason anyone writes at all.
This tension between writing as labor and writing as witness defines my struggle to connect with the page outside of work. Graduate school left me with the habit of believing that someone is always evaluating me, that each line must pass inspection. Grant writing reinforces the idea that words must perform, must yield outcomes. But my grandmother’s journals press back: words also preserve, even when they fall short of polished. Silence also speaks, when we allow it.
I joke about my closet because humor makes the weight easier to carry. I tell people I can’t walk into a stationery store without risking financial ruin, that if Sioux Falls ever opens a proper one, I’ll drown in thank-you notes and planners, but the joke covers something a little bit more real: I buy notebooks as if each one might hold the version of myself I still want to meet.
I still hesitate to call myself a writer, even though my days are surrounded by words. The imposter voice whispers that real writers don’t heave their pages empty, that they don’t keep closets full of unused books. What unsettles me most is not the blankness itself, but the far that I’ve lost connection with the self I though writing would always give me.
Maybe the truth is simpler: writing doesn’t have to prove itself to count. A grocery list in a floral journal still testifies to a day lived. A single line about the wind carries a world. Even silence says something if you choose to listen.
