Menus, Tickets, and Other Paper You Keep
Okay. How are you doing this week, actually?
Not the hallway version. Real answer, even if it's just to yourself before you keep reading.
This week I want to talk about the paper you already have. Not a new notebook, not a new habit. The stuff sitting in your junk drawer or your glove box or that one kitchen drawer that won't shut all the way because it's stuffed with receipts you can't throw out and don't know why.
I collect old menus. Restaurants that don't exist anymore, mostly. I couldn't tell you exactly why I started, except that I hate the feeling of a place just vanishing like it never mattered. A menu is proof it was real.
Last year, around the anniversary of my mom passing, I didn't want to just power through the day like I usually do. I've always been a "keep busy, get through it" person, and every year that day would come and go and I'd feel worse for having ignored it. So instead I pulled out a shoebox of her things and found this diner receipt from a place we used to go before Patrick and I got married. Coffee, two pancakes, one side of bacon we split even though neither of us would admit we wanted more than half. I sat with that receipt and wrote for maybe twenty minutes. Didn't fix anything. My mom was still gone at the end of it same as the beginning. But it gave the day somewhere to go instead of just sitting in my chest all day like a rock.
That's what I want to show you how to do with your own paper pile.
What counts as "paper you keep"
Look around before you even start writing. You're looking for:
- Menus, ticket stubs, programs from things
- Receipts you saved for no reason you can name
- Cards, notes, anything with someone's handwriting on it
- Old grocery lists (we've talked about those before — same idea, different shelf)
You probably have more of this than you think. Most people do. It's not clutter exactly. It's just paper that got promoted in your head from "trash" to "can't throw this away" without you ever deciding that on purpose.
The exercise
Pick one piece of paper. Just one. Don't dump the whole box out, you'll drown.
Set a timer for seven minutes and write about it in your journal. Not a summary of what it is — I mean write about what it's actually doing sitting in your drawer. Questions that might get you started:
- What do you remember about the day you got this?
- Who were you with, and are they still around?
- What do you remember that isn't even on the paper — the smell of the place, the chair you sat in, what somebody said?
Here's the thing I noticed with my diner receipt: I remembered the booth better than I remembered the meal. The vinyl seat, the little jukebox thing at the table that never worked. I couldn't tell you if the pancakes were good. That told me something about what my memory actually holds onto, and it wasn't the thing I would've guessed.
You might find the same. The paper's just a doorway. What's actually there is usually not what the receipt says.
An honest opinion here
People think journaling has to be about big stuff — grief, gratitude, decisions. Heck, half this course has been about exactly that. But I'll say it plain: complaining onto paper counts, list-making counts, and sitting with a ticket stub from a movie you don't even remember the plot of counts too. If it gets something out of your head and onto the page, it's doing its job. You don't need permission to write about small paper.
A few practical notes
Don't feel like you have to keep every scrap after you write about it. Some people journal about an item and then finally let themselves toss it, because the memory's safe on paper now instead of trapped in a drawer. Other people can't bear to toss anything and that's fine too — tuck the item right into your notebook if it's flat enough. A ticket stub tapes in nice.
If you're working through something heavy — and an old letter or a hospital bracelet or anything tied to a person you lost can turn heavy fast — give yourself permission to stop early. There's no rule that says you have to finish the seven minutes. I've stopped mid-sentence before. Left the rest of the page blank. The blank space is part of the entry too, honestly.
And don't go digging through boxes alone at 11pm the night before you have to work an early shift. Learned that one the hard way. Some paper deserves daylight and a clear head.
Before next time: find one piece of paper you've been keeping for no stated reason and just look at it for a minute. You don't even have to write about it yet. Just notice that you kept it. 😊