I write in my own books, pencil only, small, in the margin rather than underlining the text itself, and I’ve been doing it long enough now that going back to a book I read a decade ago means reading two things at once, whatever the author wrote and whatever I apparently thought about it at twenty-four, which is sometimes a stranger’s handwriting making a stranger’s argument.

The habit started at the reference desk, honestly, taking notes on scrap paper for patrons chasing down a source, and it migrated into my own reading without me deciding it should. Most of what I write is boring by design, a name to look up later, a date that seems off, a “wait, didn’t he already say this” flag three chapters after the fact turns out to be right. But every so often I hit an old margin note that stops me completely, something I clearly meant with total conviction at the time that I now can’t reconstruct the reasoning behind at all.

I have a copy of 1984 with three different sets of handwriting in the margins now, seventeen-year-old me, some version from my twenties I don’t fully recognize anymore, and last month’s read. The seventeen-year-old notes are almost embarrassingly earnest, exclamation points, “SO TRUE” next to passages I’d write something much drier next to now. The middle set is angrier, more political, clearly written by someone going through something I don’t remember the specifics of anymore. This last read I mostly wrote about Winston’s passivity, which apparently wasn’t on my radar at all the first two times through.

I don’t know what I’m going to think of my own current margin notes in another decade, and that’s actually the part I like best about the whole habit, that it’s not really a record for anyone else, it’s a very slow conversation with a person I haven’t become yet. My coworkers tease me about the pencil case I keep at my desk specifically for this, a whole zippered pouch just for marginalia pencils, and I don’t have a good defense except that it’s working, whatever it is I think it’s doing.

I’m not going to stop. I like being embarrassed by myself in ten year increments. It feels like proof I’m actually still changing my mind about things, not just accumulating opinions and calling it growth.