Why I Write by Hand

There's something about writing by hand that no screen has ever given me. The smell of paper, the small resistance of pen against page – it's a kind of touch, almost. And it's why, when I create my Lifebooks, I make them to be printed and filled in by hand, not typed.

I'm a morning person. My favourite hours are the early ones – tea in hand, everything still quiet, the day not yet touched by anyone else. There's something about a page at that hour that feels the same as the morning itself: still fresh, still new, still entirely unwritten. And into that stillness, I write.

Handwriting brings things to life in a way typing never quite manages. When I write my visions in my own hand, they stop being ideas and start feeling real – dreams, plans, things I hope for, things that already happened and made me happy. It feels almost like a small kind of magic, watching your own hand turn a thought into something you can actually see and hold. A Lifebook made this way becomes the most personal book you could ever create – not a record of your life, but your inner life itself, given a shape.

And I think often about the years ahead. How strange and beautiful it would be, one day, to open an old page and see exactly what your heart wanted back then – who you were, what you longed for, how far you've come since. I imagine my son finding a book like this someday. Or his children, long after I'm gone, discovering it in a drawer and reading their grandmother's – or great-grandmother's – own handwriting. I think of how much I would love to find something like that from my own parents, or grandparents. A few handwritten pages telling me who they were inside, not just what they did.

That's the part digital can never quite reach. A real book – paper you can touch, ink that was pressed there by an actual hand – carries something a screen never will. I believe there's more power in writing a vision with your own hand than typing it out. Words already hold a kind of magic. Handwritten words hold even more.