notes from self

Abby Wang — February 3, 2026

notes from self is a website that displays ten messages pulled from my digital diary—the direct messages sent to myself on Facebook Messenger—at random.¹

Showcase

How do you discern poetics from the cyclic routine of daily life? Users view messages I sent to myself between 2024-2026, the last two years of undergrad, and can muse on what provoked me to write “To be young is to be malleable to change,” or what baking project was I enlisted in when making this “cake grocery list: [cake - chocolate cake w/ hojicha chocolate butter cream and raspberry compote/rasberry sucree, topped with rasberries/sprinkles/buttercream decoration].” As the website reloads, the composition of the poem changes. It is up to random chance for what users may see concatenated together², and what poetic meaning they will gleam from connected messages that may have been sent months apart.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HUbPEHzFFH_aHKs2iUIf4UvwvzAEO4av/view?usp=sharing

notes from self

In late 2024, I endeavored to keep better track of all my writing (personal statement ideas, lab notes, daily entries, book quotes) in one space, which birthed itself as a teal green LEUCHTTURM1917 notebook that traveled with me across the country and around East Bay.

I quickly found that the physical action of pulling out the journal and pen could not work in every setting. In my insomniac fits, I had no desire to get up and turn on the lights to write something down. On the bus, it was impossible to root through my backpack and write down a observation I had about an overheard conversation.

Temporarily recording everything on my phone (before eternalizing it in my journal) came to be my solution. These messages quickly amassed over the last 2 years, and now exist in a website form: for your perusal.

Can there be poetry in the mundane thoughts, screenshots, recipes of modern life?

<aside>

¹ Why Facebook Messenger and not Apple Notes, an app actually designed to keep your notes in one location? I needed a place where I could easily grab miscellaneous links and files I shared to myself across my phone-laptop-tablet, even when Apple iCloud refused to sync. I also valued a platform where I could easily send a time-stamped thought without worrying about organizing each notes document or adding a tile. So Facebook Messenger it was. ² Thanks to the Fisher-Yates algorithm.

</aside>

Process

Ideation

I began my brainstorming over a couple of days, recording inspirations and the more concrete ideas in my journal:

I really like plain, HTML style websites so I wanted to keep this first project more minimalist. I started off on Figma, testing different monospace slab serif fonts and typography widths to figure out what overall look I wanted.

Prototyping

1) Figma

This was the initial idea I had:

I use Figma a LOT for graphics, a bit for wireframes, and rarely for using their AI to draft code for website interfaces. I played around with this feature a bit.

Hmmm…interesting results. I decided to leave it from there and use Claude instead, since this website isn’t as feature heavy (which Figma is better at).