The Everything Book

When I started college at NYU, I didn't know how to study. I went to a low income high school and everything I knew was just in my brain. I didn't have a schedule. I didn't have a planner. I didn't have anything - I started chugging along and going the route. NYU would give us these passion planners, and they just would waste space and be pretty. They had leather, so I liked to have them around but never would I actually write in them.

I realized that I needed an open space to put my ideas down. Eventually, I thought back to my childhood when I used to keep spiral notebooks to write lyrics, and I would just write everything down. I started applying this in college, where I picked up the habit of having an “everything book.” I would have a to-do list book and then an everything book. The everything book would have literally anything under the sun that I was thinking; if I'm walking down a block, and I have a random thought like, ‘Oh, my God, the sky looks blue today,’ I would write down a note that says: ‘The sky is blue. What color blue is this?’ Later on, this blue question would make an appearance in my college essay.

Once I began professionally working, I realized that I needed a space to write these type of things down while taking notes virtually. This notebook is from my MTV and VH1 days, and it has random things like little drawings from a meeting when I was tired of hearing people speak. It also has plans to write for ‘Growing Up Black,’ and specifically how I would map out the minute by minute commercials using the entire script (I knew scripted reality is a lot different from scripted television).

This is how this notebook intertwines with my creative story. I go to it first and refer back to it. The small little words, those small little ideas… they become bigger later on. Right now, I've been delving into blog writing, and it all came from this journey of self reflection.

Recently after reading Ziwe’s ‘Black Friend’, I realized that people actually have books of personal essays. So, I now walk around with my notebook, and when I'm out in the street or in the Cartier store and somebody looks up and down at me… I'm writing that down because – you're gonna become an essay. You’re gonna be a part of my story, and I'm gonna expose you on Medium.com.