“Show me your handwriting, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Maybe the saying should be updated for the 21st century: “Show me your Notes app, and I’ll tell you how chaotic your soul truly is.”
There’s something magical about the tools we choose to write with. A pen isn’t just a pen, a notebook isn’t just a notebook, and a keyboard isn’t just a keyboard. They are extensions of our minds, mirrors of our personalities, and, in some cases, silent confidants that see us at our most raw.
Think about the last time you picked up a pen. Did your fingers brush against the smooth plastic of a gel pen, perfectly designed for color-coding your life? Or did you unscrew the cap of a fountain pen, careful not to smear the delicate ink across the page? Maybe you swiped open your Notes app on your phone, thumbs flying across the screen in a frantic attempt to capture fleeting thoughts before they disappeared into the chaos of your day.
Each choice says something about us — sometimes more than we realize. Perhaps the fountain pen person values patience, nostalgia, and deliberate beauty. Maybe the gel pen enthusiast is a meticulous planner, someone who craves order in an otherwise messy world. The pencil writer? They understand impermanence, revision, and the quiet humility of self-reflection. And the digital scribes? They thrive in speed, flexibility, and the infinite possibilities of a world without physical limits.
Writing is intimate. It is both action and reflection, performance and preservation. When we write, we expose ourselves, even if no one else ever sees the words. And our choice of medium — ink, graphite, pixels — tells a story before the words themselves even appear.
The Fountain Pen People
Fountain pen people live in slow motion — but not in a bad way. They are the kind who sip, not gulp. Who smell the pages of old books. Who have playlists titled Rainy Day Contemplations and take pride in the ink stains on their fingers as if they were war medals.
There’s ritual in how they write. Uncapping the pen. Filling it with ink. The test scribble in the corner of a page. Each word is deliberate, an offering. Writing with a fountain pen forces you to slow down — to think before you bleed ink onto paper.
These people are often nostalgic by nature.
They romanticize moments, fall in love with handwriting styles, and may or may not have cried once in a stationery store. They know that the weight of a pen can make words feel heavier, truer, more permanent.
If you look closely, the fountain pen person is usually the keeper of journals — the kind you’ll never see posted online. Their writing exists in the private folds of notebooks, tucked between coffee receipts and pressed flowers. Writing is not performance; it’s preservation.
“The pen is not mightier than the sword; sometimes it’s mightier than your own procrastination.”
Gel Pen Lovers: Organized Chaos
Then there are the gel pen loyalists — the ones who color-code their existence and believe that pink ink deserves the same respect as black.
They were the kids who used glitter pens to write their homework titles and now use highlighters to annotate feelings in novels.
Gel pen people love aesthetic control.
They live somewhere between chaos and choreography, believing that if they just use the right pen color, maybe life will make a little more sense.
Gel pen people are often perfectionists — they’ll rewrite entire pages if the handwriting looks off. They are the planners, the to-do list warriors, the bullet journal curators. Their notebooks are a museum of beautiful order and occasional breakdowns.
But under the neatness lies restlessness — an urge to organize the intangible. Gel pen users are often trying to make their emotions legible, to contain the mess of life within dotted grids and pastel ink. Their pages are where vulnerability meets precision — tears next to task lists.
Pencil Philosophers: Embracing Impermanence
Pencil people are tender souls. They understand impermanence. They write with hesitation and hope — because they know everything can be erased, redrawn, rewritten.
There’s humility in choosing graphite over ink. A quiet understanding that what we write doesn’t always have to be forever. That sometimes, drafts are all we need to make sense of ourselves.
Pencil people are often reflective, maybe a bit indecisive.
They’re thinkers before they are doers — the ones who pause mid-sentence, erase, and try again. Their notebooks are soft with eraser marks, filled with ghost words that once existed.
In a way, pencil writing mirrors life: you keep revising until it feels right.
Keyboard Creatives: Speed and Flexibility
Then there are the typists — the digital scribes of the 21st century. Their handwriting might be illegible, but their typing speed? Olympic-level. They live in Google Docs, Notes, Notion, or Scrivener, each platform a new iteration of their mind.
Keyboard people are idea factories.
They think fast, type faster, and rarely pause for punctuation. Their creativity flows at the speed of thought — editable, expandable, infinitely revisable.
But this efficiency comes with a price: the loss of intimacy. There’s something coldly mechanical about typing compared to handwriting. Words appear instantly, detached from the effort of forming each letter.
Still, digital writers have their magic. They know the power of the cursor — that blinking invitation to begin again. The keyboard offers them flexibility, anonymity, and instant access to inspiration. For them, writing is not about nostalgia; it’s about now.
Notes App Poets: The Impulsive Creatives
Somewhere between chaos and clarity live the Notes App Poets — a species that thrives on impulse.
They write in transit, in bed, in bathroom stalls, in moments of heartbreak or boredom. Their words live between reminders and grocery lists, a mix of “Buy toothpaste” and “Love is a bruise that won’t fade.”
Notes App people don’t wait for the right moment; they capture it.
Their creativity is instant, messy, unfiltered. And there’s something deeply authentic about that. They write like no one’s watching because, really, no one is.
It’s easy to dismiss Notes App writing as unserious — but it’s also one of the most honest forms of modern expression. It’s where people draft confessions they’ll never send, eulogies for relationships that never happened, or entire poems written between voice notes and alarms.
They don’t write to be remembered. They write to release.
Calligraphy Keepers: Letters as Art
There’s another kind — the calligraphy lovers, the ink artisans. To them, writing isn’t communication; it’s choreography.
They treat letters like architecture — each stroke designed with intention. These are the people who still buy wax seals and care about the texture of paper. They write thank-you notes by hand, invitations with loops that look like lace.
Their writing isn’t just about words — it’s about beauty. About slowing down enough to make something look as meaningful as it feels.
And maybe, in a world where we type “hbd” instead of “happy birthday,” these people are the last romantics. They remind us that language isn’t just sound — it’s art.
The Soul Writes in Many Fonts
The tools we choose are reflections of how we process life.
The fountain pen says, “Slow down.”
The gel pen says, “Organize your chaos.”
The pencil says, “Try again.”
The keyboard says, “Keep going.”
The Notes app says, “Feel something right now.”
There’s no wrong choice. Only the one that feels most like you.
Because ultimately, writing isn’t about ink or pixels — it’s about connection. Between your mind and your heart. Between what you think and what you dare to admit. And in that connection lies something deeply human. The stationery of the soul — messy, mismatched, sometimes unreadable — but always, beautifully yours.
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And if you’d like to explore more of my world, visit my corner at HCMUJ — Aditi Thakur