What’s in the drawer you never let anyone read?
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Welcome to What I Learned From…, a curious little newsletter full of essays, advice, and rabbit holes for writers who want to sharpen their craft without losing their edge. If someone forwarded this because they think you're one of us, they’re probably right. You can subscribe here. “For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl.” — Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl What I Learned From …Pamela Anderson (yes, that Pamela Anderson…the Baywatch babe, Playboy bunny, sex kitten of the 90s) wakes up early. Not for glam squads or media appearances, but to light candles, bake bread, and write. Not type. Not tap. Write. Longhand. With a pen. On yellow legal pads. “There are yellow legal pads everywhere,” she told Better Homes & Gardens. “I write all the time.” Her mornings begin at four or five, keeping what she calls “baker’s hours,” scribbling with the sunrise while dough rises in the kitchen. Some of it ends up in her newsletter, her novels, or her memoir. Most of it never will. What struck me wasn’t the ritual itself, though it’s lovely. It’s why she does it. “I write to know how I feel,” she said. “Sometimes writing is easier than telling somebody how you feel, especially in a modern world that has lost a little bit of this human connection.” Writing to be understood. Not to be seen. Pamela Anderson was seen constantly. Decades of paparazzi, billboards, magazine spreads, red carpets, gossip headlines. But being seen that much doesn’t mean people ever really know who you are. In fact, it can make it harder. As she notes in her memoir Love, Pamela, “Most people's lives go unrecorded, or worse, unlived.” In her documentary Pamela, a Love Story, Anderson lets her past self narrate the arc of her life. Not through scripted interviews, but through the journals and legal pads and home movies she kept in private. She asks them to have someone else do the voiceover (coincidentally, it ended up being a producer who was charged with transcribing the actual thousands of pages of bubbly-font handwriting.) The film unfolds as a kind of living archive, where the woman onscreen is rediscovering who she was through the words she once wrote down. A moment that transcends self-care and becomes a method of time travel. She doesn’t pretend it was easy. “It’s tough to go through it again,” she says in the film. “Because you go through it again like you’re going through it for the first time…it’s painful.” These pages weren’t curated drafts or performative diaries. They were emotional ledgers and survival notes. What you write when life doesn’t make sense and the only person you can really talk to is the future version of you. “I wanted to write things down in case I forgot them,” she says in the film. “I don’t know if I want to go there and read them…I like to do things just for the experience of doing it. I want to move on with the next part of my life.” There’s something rare and defiant in that choice: to record something without needing to revisit it. It’s not a Graveyard Doc, it’s a safe little haven for her thoughts and feelings. In a world full of algorithm anxiety and performative note-taking apps, Anderson’s legal pads feel like a quiet rebellion. Anderson has published four books, including a memoir with original poetry that actually earned some great reviews. She is a writer in the most literal, practiced sense. But what makes her a compelling figure for this essay isn’t the writing she shares with her readers. It’s the writing she keeps. In one interview, she described how writing saved her as a child and teenager. That hasn’t changed. The notebooks still function as a kind of compass. But when she and her son Brandon began reviewing them for the Netflix documentary, it wasn’t about branding or reinvention. It was a reckoning. The words were evidence of a life she had lived and somehow survived. This is something that’s pulled at me a lot over the past couple years. The idea of looking back at the life I’ve lived, the things I’ve created and done, and the ways I’ve failed…boldly and painfully, in very public ways. You might have had moments or periods like that as well? Days that you wake up, honestly surprised that you made it to another sunrise. “I didn’t plan on this whole healing experience, but as the days went on, it’s what happened.” That healing came from the slow, quiet shift of putting distance between who she had to be and who she actually is. As she puts it: “That was the beginning of me letting go of the image I had always had of myself. What is this cartoon character that I’d created? Okay, that was fun. But I’m not that person anymore.” It wasn’t the journals alone that stripped the mask away. It was leaving Los Angeles. Stepping away from fame. Letting the lifestyle built around that character slip away. Learning to trust again, and falling foolishly and recklessly in love because she wants to foolishly and recklessly believe in love. The writing was a thread she held through it all. Anderson’s notebooks aren’t relics. They’re proof of a woman who spent decades being looked at, learning how to see herself. It’s worth remembering, in an age where every thought seems destined for content, that some writing isn’t meant to be shared. Not because it’s bad or unpolished, but because its work is already done. You don’t have to publish everything you write. You don’t even have to keep it. You can write just to get it out of your system. Yellow legal pads are cheap and practical. No one's writing on them to be fancy. But they carry weight. And if you’ve ever filled one with your own words, you know the way it hums. Not with ambition or polish. Instead, it’s the frenzied truth of a person writing on what’s available, flipping pages over the top to get to the next free line. Journals and diaries aren’t childish or indulgent. They’re writing, too. In fact, sometimes they are the only kind of writing that matters. Previously in This Writing Life …All the good stuff you were meant to see but probably didn’t.
Worth Reading …The pieces that made me pause last week.
Notes from the Masters …Craft advice that holds up, straight from the ones who lived it. “Of course, a writer’s journal must not be judged by the standards of a diary. The notebooks of a writer have a very special function: in them he builds up, piece by piece, the identity of a writer to himself. Typically, writers’ notebooks are crammed with statements about the will: the will to write, the will to love, the will to renounce love, the will to go on living. The journal is where a writer is heroic to himself. In it he exists solely as a perceiving, suffering, struggling being.” — Susan Sontag on Albert Camus’ notebooks, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays Prompted: Your Move …A spark from this week’s essay. Use it to write your own. Grab the nearest scrap of paper and write one sentence you’d never share. (Now: Crumple it? Save it? Post it? Or surprise yourself and slip it into someone’s pocket?) Glossary of The Forgotten …Because life’s too chaotic for bland words. Eviternity [eh-vih-TUR-nuh-tee] (n.) — From the Latin aeviternitas, meaning “endless duration” or “perpetual existence,” distinct from eternity in that it refers not to infinite time but to a timeless state outside of it. Often used in medieval philosophy to describe angels and souls, now it's more about that text thread you just can't delete as it hums with that special something years later or the way your grandmother’s perfume still hangs in her closet...not gone, just outside time. Sorta synonyms: timelessness, a pocket of forever, suspended animation Use it for: Rereading a journal entry that still vibrates ("12 years on and this heartbreak still hums with eviternity") or the song that stops you mid-step because it didn't age—you did. Try This Thing …No promises. Just a potentially brilliant shortcut or two. Typing Bird. A simple site full of typing games to help improve your touch typing; a must for any writer who toils at the keys. It says it’s for kids, but I think it’s ok for adults to play the games too (especially if you want a fun way to loosen up your fingers before a writing session!) The Final Chuckle …Serious writing deserves unserious endings. There are just some things you can’t put a price tag on, Harold. ‘Til next time ~ Elisa PS - Got a friend who hoards legal pads or writes love letters they'll never send? Go ahead and forward this along. The best people find things through whispers, not ads. |