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I Finally Found the Perfect Planner. Then Trump Ruined It

How a paper company and tariffs threw the world of stationery hobbyists into chaos

I still remember the paper planners we got in elementary school. They were spiral-bound, with lined paper, and each page bore an inspirational quotation—the usual stuff about hard work and success and a great attitude. We were to use them to write down assignments, their due dates, and things that happened during the day so nothing would get lost. What I most recall is the hope they represented.

Each new planner a teacher handed me at the beginning of the school year inspired feelings I can describe only in religious terms: mercy, redemption, grace. Whenever I opened one for the first time, there was a lightness in my heart, the kind that came with casting off a long-held burden of shame.

The past didn’t matter, because this year, I knew, would be the year. The year I’d finally live up to the potential everyone seemed sure I had. This would be the year I got organized. The year I used my planner every single day.

And every year, I was right—at first. I would take to my planner with a zeal matched only by converts, religious or otherwise. Then I’d miss a day. Then another. And a few days later, a week or two at most, that planner would be cast aside with all my other past planners and notebooks with a few pages used. (If young Anne Shirley’s life was “a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” young Sarah Trick’s was a perfect graveyard of buried notebooks.)

I would never look at the planner again unless forced. Every sight of it was humiliating. And every year, the humiliation got worse.

Clearly, I was always going to be the person who, according to virtually every adult authority figure I had, “struggled with time management” and “could be so successful if she just applied herself.” Not for me were the colour-coded to-do lists, the stickers for a job well done. I was more of a crumpled-sheet-of-paper-found-in-the-bottom-of-my-backpack-three-days-after-the-assignment-was-due kind of girl.

Even after I aged out of school-supplied planners, each fresh start—new year, new semester, new job—was an opportunity to leave shame behind, and I was sure that a different planner or notebook was just what I needed. This conviction worked as well as it always had, and after a while, I gave up hope.

Then, a few things happened. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult. The treatment helped immensely with organization, and armed with new knowledge, I finally learned to use methods that worked for my brain, not against it. Unlike neurotypical brains, ADHD brains aren’t motivated by what’s most important to them or to other people. “If you wanted to, you’d do it,” a refrain I’d heard often, literally wasn’t true for me. Instead, ADHD brains are motivated by interest, challenge, novelty, and urgency. That’s why so many of us can pull off huge projects in zero time but can barely function in day-to-day life. If I wanted to get organized, I had to make it fun.

The quest to make things fun eventually led me to fountain pens. I’d always wanted to try them but assumed they’d be too hard to manage with my disabilities—in addition to ADHD, I have cerebral palsy, which affects my........

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