Confessions of a Pen Hoarder

I have a confession to make. I have a lot of pens.

I don't know how many pens you just imagined, but it probably wasn't enough. I have a truly ridiculous number of pens. I had the thought of trying to round them all up, bringing them to my dining room table, and dumping them all out for a photo. But that would require me to dump out all four of my pen cups, pull all the pens out of my desk, the big pen box in my kitchen, and any other pens I have stashed in the hall closet that I've forgotten about.

I have A LOT of pens.

Where do I get them all? The same places as everyone else. The store. The internet. Conferences. Business pens. Foundlings. Gifts. I love the feeling of getting a new pen. All the possibilities of what I can do with it. Poetry. Journal entries. Letters. Lists. Notes. Outlines. Lyrics. Quotes. Affirmations. The thing I know I'm going to forget to do if I don't write it down and it'll ruin my whole day. Deeply important things that if I forget to do them, they could ruin my entire life and future. Buying a new pen, in my brain, feels exactly like going on an exciting journey and avoiding an impending disaster all at the same time.

You can tell a lot about a woman by whatever the thing is that she accumulates too many of in her purse. For some, it's receipts. For others, it's lip stuff. For me, it's pens. You can measure how dire my mental state is by how many pens I have in my purse. The day I demonstrated this to my therapist, I pulled seven pens out of my bag. What was I going to write with the seventh pen that I couldn't write with the first six? I have no idea.

Some people do the walk of shame back to their apartment after waking up next to a stranger they don't remember meeting at a bar. I buy pens at Walmart in the self-checkout lane at 10:30 at night on a Tuesday because I had to buy milk and was vaguely sad.

Then quarantine started. EVERYONE is vaguely sad. But you can't go buy pens at Walmart when you're vaguely sad at 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday when Walmart isn't open that late anymore. Not on Tuesday. Not on any day.

So rather than finding excuses to accumulate more pens (although with online shopping being the way it is, COVID-19 isn't going to stop me), I now looking for more reasons to use the pens in my collection. All the journaling, letter and postcard writing, doodling, planning, list making, and everything else you can do with a pen. That's what I'm setting out to do, one flourish at a time.