Making scrapbooks again has quietly saved my sanity

I spend every day thinking about far too many things. Work. Parenting. Food shopping. Bills. Things I need to reply to. Things I should have started last week. Plans for next month. Ideas I don't want to forget. It feels like I have thirty browser tabs open in my head at all times.

I had to pause because somewhere along the way, I realised I didn't really have any hobbies left. Everything I enjoyed had quietly become centred around work or being a parent. I couldn't remember the last time I did something that existed purely because it made me happy. I knew I needed something that wasn't another screen.

So I wandered into B&M, picked up a few notebooks, and later spent an embarrassing amount of time on Shein filling my basket with sticker packs. The funny thing is, we already had plenty of art supplies at home. Pens, paper, craft bits, magazines. I'd just forgotten they were allowed to be for me, too.

At first, it felt strange. I thought I was supposed to write a proper diary, the whole Dear Diary... routine I had as a teenager. Turns out I didn't want that at all. Now it's just my book of everything.

Some mornings I write a few lines. Other days, I don't write anything and just decorate a page. I cut articles out of magazines. I stick on little gems and washi tape. I add stickers for absolutely no reason other than I like them.

Recently, I purchased one of those daily word search books. I finish the puzzle, cut out the page, and stick it into the scrapbook. I've started doing the same with Sudoku puzzles and magazine articles I want to keep. It's messy and fun, and reminds me of my art portfolio bag thing teenage me used to hold and guard with her life.  

For the first time in a long time, I have something that isn't productive, isn't content, isn't work, and isn't for anyone else.

It's just mine. And I think that's exactly what I was missing.   

Writing Into the Nothingness: The Romance of the Under-Optimised Personal Site

I couldn’t help but wonder... when did sharing our thoughts online become an unpaid sales job?

Lately, it feels like the universal prescription for having an opinion is to start a Substack. Everyone is doing it. You click a link expecting a quick read, and before you can even scan the first paragraph, a giant modal pops up demanding your email address, your attention, and eventually, ten dollars a month. Suddenly, you aren’t just a person sharing a thought; you’re a "publication" with a subscriber goal, a content pipeline, and a metric dashboard.

But what if you don't want a newsletter? What if you just want a room of your own?

The current pressure in the digital air right now to turn every interest into a transaction is exhausting. We are told to build "perceived social capital," to chase "empty followers," and to feed the machine. And to make it worse, the internet is suddenly flooded with the slick, unmistakable sheen of AI-generated prose, lots of paragraphs that are perfectly structured, and completely devoid of human blood. It is noise. Not even good noise. Just optimised echo chambers designed to make us look busy.

I find myself deeply nostalgic for the old blog format. The one that didn't ask you to subscribe to anything.

Remember when a personal website was just a space on the net? It didn't have a database, it didn't track your scroll depth, and it certainly didn't send push notifications to someone's phone at dinner. It was just a static page, a couple of custom styles, and a few thoughts typed up late at night.

Kathleen Kelly is sitting at her cosy wooden desk, staring at a boxy 90s monitor, wondering if anyone on the other side of the dial-up connection is actually reading.

I don't want to rent a space inside someone else’s walled garden, constantly worried that a platform’s shifting algorithm or sudden bankruptcy might delete my entire digital footprint overnight. There is an existential peace in paying a few pounds a year for your own domain, finding a cheap, lightweight way to host it, and letting it exist independently. Maybe that’s the real luxury of the modern web: the freedom to write into the nothingness. To build a space that is under-optimised, completely quiet, and entirely yours.