Notebook-Book

Part 1. A Personal Story

I have been keeping journals since childhood. Not because someone told me I “should,” or because it was “useful.” I started writing because I found it difficult to understand this world and myself within it. It seemed there was something wrong with me: too sensitive, too emotional, too strange… I would retreat into solitude and pour absolutely everything onto those pages.

That is how I gathered myself together. That is how I created myself. Decades of entries, hundreds of notebooks.

For many years now, I have been reading around ten books at the same time. It is difficult to surprise me with the complexity of a text or the depth between its lines.

The most difficult book in my life turned out not to be philosophy, psychology, ancient texts, or scientific research.

It was my own journal. I laughed and cried out loud, washed my face with tears, closed it because I could not bear to read further, threw it away and came back to it again.

That is how this artist’s object emerged from the story of my life. I created it for myself, but at some point I felt the desire to share it with the world.

Part 2. Why a “Book”?

Why a “book” when, in its form, structure, and purpose, it is a notebook? I have filled hundreds of notebooks, but it was in that very ruthless and honest journal that I discovered the Book of my own Scenario.

The cover features my painting «The Growth Scheme». Perhaps the most challenging work of my life to this day, because it became my Teacher and the only painting I desperately wanted to destroy while creating it. Today I understand that it was stronger than I was. Braver. It never let me go all these years. Only with time did I realize how it had caught up with me, how I had lived through it, and how it opened me to an entirely different depth.

On the outside, on the cover, is The Growth Scheme: geometry, drawings of the mind, flat thinking. Inside is your «Scenario of the Spirit»: a blank page on which your Self begins to write its own unpredictable story instead of yet another mental scheme.

This is how depth is born: the drawings of Personality interacting with the Scenario of the Spirit. Perhaps that is why this artist’s object came into being within the space of this particular painting.

Part 3. A Manifesto of Freedom

I did not create yet another beautiful notebook. The market is full of them. And I certainly did not create another self-improvement system. There are no gratitude lists here, no exercises, and no instructions for the “right way to live,” although many expected practices and ready-made answers from me.

I do not believe that you need fixing. I do not believe that you are broken. I categorically do not believe in the endless race toward the illusion of “there is no limit to perfection,” where people endlessly divide themselves into pieces and polish them until they shine. You are already whole. Right now. Exactly as you are. Freedom instead of instructions. But freedom not in the sense of “I do whatever I want,” rather the freedom that begins in silence.

That is why there are only blank pages inside. As a symbol of absolute trust in your inner voice. Even the dot grid is barely visible, a delicate hint. Silence. Space. And trust in yourself. My words are no longer needed here — that is what this book is for.

I am not offering you another scenario. I am offering you the chance to set aside someone else’s. At least for a while. And begin writing your own. Whether it is this artist’s object or a simple green school notebook does not matter. The method matters. A method in which paper becomes a space of silence in a world that may be shouting far too loudly right now.

You are allowed.
You are allowed to feel everything. You are allowed to doubt. You are allowed to make mistakes.
You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed not to know.
You are allowed to be inconvenient, uncomfortable, or an “improper” person.
You are allowed to begin again.

I do not know what will appear on your pages. I do not know what questions you will ask yourself or what answers will come. I do not know how many times you will want to close this book, or how many times you will return to it. But I know one thing: a blank page is capable of changing a life. I have seen it too many times. On my own pages. In my own story. In my own truth.

What lies beneath your cover?

With respect to your path and experience,
Yulya Demina