I don’t keep a diary. I’ve tried – more times than I’d like to admit. There are at least half a dozen half-used notebooks in my closet, each abandoned somewhere around page twelve. I’d start with the best intentions: “This time I’ll write something down every night before bed.” But life always crept in. Some nights I’d come home too tired to string a sentence together, other nights I’d forget altogether.

I didn’t notice that I had been keeping a diary. It wasn’t inside a leather-bound notebook but little strips of paper that accumulate inside my purse, get wedged into bags, or are left on the kitchen counter: receipts from the grocery store.

First Time I Noticed

I was running on empty last night. Straight from the office to the grocery store… still in heels, thoughts already on tomorrow’s to-do list. Unpacked later- receipt sloppily tossed onto the counter. Probably wouldn’t have given it a second thought but was probably putting off washing the dishes so glanced down at it.

Greek yogurt, granola bars, and a couple of frozen pizzas. Oh, and a bunch of tulips too. Don't

It was no longer just a bill. It turned into the polaroid of my week. Yogurt and bars for mornings I’d been so swamped to have real breakfast. Pizzas for late nights when the mojo for cooking returned decently. Tulips? Just a note to self that little things count. And wine– well that’s from the night a friend came over and we laughed for three hours over nothing and everything.

Box of Receipts

It was regularly afterward. Whenever I would put receipts in an old shoebox and not just throw them away. At first, it was from laziness—I didn’t bother to throw them out. Months later, half a box full, I found myself sitting on my living room floor, going through them.

The patterns leapt to my attention. The last few ’ve been on a bender: bags of chips and soda, late-night candy runs. And this past week, when I felt in balance, salmon and kale and quinoa with spices I hadn’t yet bought. Some were receipts for holidays; bags of flour and sugar for December, birthday candles for March. Others were silent register tapes of those moments in my life, more of a concession to the fast life choices than I was getting time for, in a double order of steamed vegetables at dinner, during one evening out, or the sudden-frozen dinners placed there during a breakup.

No one else would have found the receipts interesting; to me, they were parts of a diary I had not known I was even writing.

Why Receipts Are Better Than Diaries

A diary begs to remember to be thoughtful when asked. A receipt never asks for something; it’s always done by itself. Without judgment, stress, an empty page looking back at you. It simply piles up all the pieces of your days till when you want to look back.

You do, and it’s truthful in a manner memory sometimes isn’t. I can tell myself I don’t consume a lot of sugar, but that Target receipt with four bags of gummy bears says otherwise. I can say I’ve been “good” with cooking at home too, but the quantity of takeout orders begs to differ fast.There’s something anchoring about that truthfulness.

The Charlotte Connection

I have witnessed, and so have you if you live in Charlotte, the speed at which our lives are being digitized. The city is overwhelmed with tech projects, and one may feel that there is an app being launched every week. It’s true—mobile app development Charlotte is one of the booming things. You can sense it in the talks in the cafes and coworking spaces.

Most of these apps are basically doing what my pile of receipts tucked within a shoebox does. There’s an app that suggests what to eat – so now what? budgeting separated from the spending categorization, and an app that tells you whether your grocery habits are trending ‘balanced’ or ‘concerning.

However, here’s the catch: not one of them feels really like paper receipts do. Applications clean the data. They present it as nice charts or weekly summaries. My receipts do no sugarcoating. They are as blunt as the beep from the cashier on a Wednesday evening when I bought that family-sized ice cream tub for myself.

When Data Becomes Personal

Notably appropriate because I’m in marketing and wrangle data all day, analyzing click-through rates, performance on campaigns, engagement metrics-I can chart and report ad nauseam. But staring at my grocery receipts, that’s when it hit me how human data can get when you’re the one inside the numbers.

More than proof of purchase, a receipt serves to prove one’s appetites, preferences, and at times moods, for example, ‘’birthday cake for Dad,’’ ‘’wine for the breakup,’’ ‘’protein shakes for the new workout plan.’’

And yet, with all the stuff apps try to figure out, there are times when that paper copy just feels more human.

What I Picture for Tomorrow

Of course, I’m not naive. Paper won’t always win. Someday soon, receipts will be entirely digital, and shoeboxes such as mine will be replaced by folders in the cloud. Maybe one of those Charlotte developers will even create an app that lets you “live” via receipts, with little notes you can attach: “This was for Sunday brunch w/ Sarah” or “Bought extra snacks b/c had a bad week.”

Anyways, tapping into me the dim in, coffee spots, and folded-up sides are totally what present it an actual seed vibe as observed with paper.

Looking at those receipt papers again taught me something very simple but very essential: the small things are always the most revealing. We preach words on a page as diaries, but sometimes it is numbers, prices, and items that write one’s life.

Maybe I’ll never be that person who writes in a notebook every night, but I am that person who still keeps a diary, albeit one that prints out at the register.

And you know what? It’s doing the trick.