Day: January 2, 2026

Prompt – A rule you refused to follow.

The cover of my Trapper Keeper glowed like the inside of an arcade, all neon and loud. “Stay Rad” splashed across the front like graffiti that wanted to be dangerous but felt more like a fat kid trying to be cool. Behind it, a glowing triangle pulsed like the screen right before a new video game loads. That brief pause held its breath and made a promise just like my planner. The Trapper Keeper whispered that anything was possible, if only life was structured in just the right way.

The lie it tried to sell me, and an entire generation, was simple. Stay organized and life will fall into place. Keep my schedules straight. Keep my notes tight. Keep my dreams in tidy sections, labeled, hole-punched, and snapped into place, class after class. If I could trap it, I could keep it.

There was a rule hidden inside that message, and I have bucked that rule since the moment I knew it existed. Use the planner and live by the calendar, treating the schedule like scripture, is what the academy says to be true. As a student and later as a teacher, I saw it everywhere, as common as desks and whiteboards. Another system. Another promise. Another planner with color-coded order pretending to tame the chaos. Such bullshit.

So I refused.

I refused the Franklin Planner. I refused the Full Focus planner. I refused the Roterrunner. I refused the PalmPilot because that thing never flew! I opened them. I turned the pages. I studied the boxes and printed times that tried to tell me where my life belonged, and something in me said no. I even carried some of them, like talismans I was expected to believe in. But schedules felt like cages. Those preprinted lines felt like a stranger beside me in the cafeteria, offering advice that did not know my story. I did not want every minute accounted for, nor did I want my thoughts sealed into plastic sleeves like tiny body bags for the dead.

Instead, I wanted space for the unexpected. I wanted room to scribble, cross out, wander, and return. I wanted the wide, blank page where anything might appear. Teachers said that being organized meant being mature. Colleagues said that being planned meant being professional. The rule insisted that if I could not live inside the planner, I would fall behind, lose track, and fail.

Maybe. Maybe not. Or absolutely not and immediately no.

What I knew, even then, was simple. My mind did not grow inside boxes. My imagination did not breathe inside time slots. The most important learning arrived in margins, in scribbles, in the slow wandering back to myself. I carried the Trapper Keeper and with it I carried the illusion of control. But the rule that said the planner must run my life. I refused that one.

And in refusing, I learned something I could not learn any other way. Life does not live on lined paper. Meaning does not arrive neatly labeled. The heart does not follow gridlines, and neither does grief, or wonder, or love, or anything that keeps me waking up and trying again. The planner promised certainty. What I needed was presence.

So I chose the blank space. The risk. The messy page that told the truth. Not tidy. Not perfect. Just alive. That became the real rule for me. Stay curious and be willing to get lost. What matters most cannot be trapped, and it sure as hell cannot be kept.

It can only be lived.