An ode to the only place I’ve ever told the truth: the Notes app.
I realized recently that my Notes app knows me better than any diary I’ve ever owned. Which is funny, because the diary is the one I treat like a sacred object, and Notes is the one I treat like the junk drawer of my brain.
But the junk drawer always has the real stuff, doesn’t it?
We treat diaries like exhibitions. Something curated. Something that has to be pretty enough to deserve our inner lives. And because of that, we never give it the real thing. We give it “day one of being a better person.” We give it structured paragraphs. We give it updates. We give it handwriting we hope someone will find endearing someday.
Meanwhile, Notes holds the version of me that I would physically run away from if she ever tried to talk to me in public.
I’ve been keeping diaries since I could write anything beyond my name, the date, and a flower that looked like a crime scene. But at some point, I realized I was doing it out of fear that losing the habit meant losing a piece of my personality that I had advertised so loudly growing up. And I hated that. I hated knowing the act had become a performance too.
Also, let’s be honest: I like beautiful objects. I like things that look intentional, crafted. But the writing—the real writing—wandered off. Word docs. Notion (during my clean girl phase). And Notes. Always Notes. And yet I never called it a diary. As if it were too unworthy.
It was where I wrote the cover letters for jobs I cried about.
Where I listed the documents for my passport renewal.
Where I wrote an apology to a man who loved me too fast.
And one to another man who didn’t even bother to answer.
Where I wrote prayers because saying them out loud felt like trying to squeeze words through a wall I built myself.
Tell me again that Notes is “just an app.”
Igor Kopytoff once wrote about the “cultural biography of things,” how objects only become meaningful through the lives we let them witness, not through the purpose they were manufactured for. A diary printed to be a diary doesn’t become a diary until you treat it like one. A cooking notebook becomes a memoir the moment you slip a confession between two recipes.
Meaning isn’t printed on the box. We write it in—by using the thing the wrong way, the real way.
And whether we like it or not, there’s something in us that still believes authenticity only lives in physical objects. I hate that word—authenticity—but it’s true: we think the “real” version of ourselves needs paper to exist. And this is exactly how taste works: form becomes a class marker. A leather diary signals discipline, intellect, some imaginary higher version of ourselves. Meanwhile a Notes app feels too democratic, too accessible, too un-special to hold our genius or our disasters. We pretend it’s about aesthetics, but half the time it’s about distinction—about proving, even privately, that we consume the right things, the smart things, the beautiful things. Consumerism has tricked us into believing personality is something we can buy at a stationery store. But the truth is embarrassingly simple: the cheapest object in our pocket can be the one actually recording our lives.
Like my mother and her cooking notebook. Blue cover. Bent edges. The best recipes she got from friends, family, and the TV channel Fatafeat. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. But through the soups and pastries, she slipped in her thoughts, phone numbers, doodles made while gossiping with her sister, and entire paragraphs about my dad “when he didn’t act right.”
My mother kept her official agendas pristine—leather-bound, souvenirs from her travels, everything aligned and elegant. But her real diary was the stained, beloved cooking notebook. Beautiful things must stay beautiful; the truth gets stored elsewhere.
My cooking notebook is my Notes app.
It holds my salary calculations, my fears about the future, my hopes for a kinder world. It stores my exam dates, my emotional weather forecast, my half-baked epiphanies at 3 a.m.
It looked like nothing.
It contained everything.
I still love a $30 diary. I’ll probably buy another one very soon because I’m predictable like that. But we both know where the truth is being stored, and it’s not always between two linen covers.
It’s between me and the only app that has seen every version of me. Honestly, Notes should unionize. It’s doing emotional labor no object ever signed up for.
