THE GOOD
PEN.

For twenty-four years I believed there were exactly two kinds of pen users. A stray pen from my husband’s pocket collapsed that in a single afternoon.

Normal people, and snobs.

The rule was simple and I never questioned it. There are people who use whatever pen they could find, and there are people who spend real money on pens and want you to know it. I was firmly the first kind. Pens were pens. Caring about them was a small vanity I was proud not to have.

It helps to know where I learned the rule. I came up in newsrooms, where a pen was a disposable nobody actually owned. Nobody ever had one. A free pen felt like swag because it was that scarce, and if you handed someone a pen they wanted it back, even when it started life as a freebie. That’s the soil my whole theory of pens grew in.

Pens are communal, likely contaminated (post-COVID thinking) and always someone else’s.

So this wasn’t deprivation. The easy version of this story is a sad one and it would be a lie. I didn’t feel cheated. I had no idea there was anything to feel cheated about. You can’t miss a thing you had no knowledge of.

My husband came home with a pen in his pocket from work, which happened all the time. Customers signed paperwork in his office all day, so he was a revolving door of pens. But this time I needed to jot a list of reminders right as he walked in and emptied his pockets on the counter. By accident (the way half the good things in a marriage arrive), I picked up my first Sharpie S-Gel. If you’re one of the people who care about pens, a gel pen isn’t a remarkable thing. For me it was a watershed. I wrote a few words. No drag. No skip. No little dry patch where you go back and scribble a circle to wake the ink up. This pen was different and I could never un-know it.

The shock wasn’t luxury. It was a third pen category I didn’t know existed. Not cheap and fine. Not expensive and precious.

Just better and apparently sitting in plain sight the whole time.

The third category had a name. Gel ink. A Japanese company called Sakura cracked it in the early 1980s by thickening the ink with xanthan gum, the same food thickener that turns up in your salad dressing. It glides because it loosens under the friction of your own hand, which is the exact feeling I couldn’t stop noticing. The Gelly Roll version ran the middle-school world in the ’90s, all glitter and rainbow multipacks, and somehow it never once reached me. My Sharpie S-Gel only launched in 2020, a fresh label on a forty-year-old idea.

The revolution in how a pen could feel had happened decades ago and a few aisles over.

I walked right past it the whole time.

This is the part that matters. The question had never formed. My workday pace got set in a newsroom, where a stray thought about pen quality wouldn’t survive ten seconds before the next thing ran it over. You don’t investigate a preference you don’t have time to notice.

But on this day, a small, non-urgent observation got to live long enough to become a question. It wasn’t “I deserve better.” Nothing that grand. Just… huh. This is different. Why is this different?

My standards hadn’t changed. My speed had.

Writing is sacred to me. I should say that plainly, because it’s the whole reason a pen could matter at all. For decades I did the most serious thing I do with whatever was rolling around the bottom of a bag. I’d earned a better writing experience years ago. It just never once occurred to me that I was someone entitled to one.

So I took that pen as mine. It became a version of the sword I pulled from the stone, an artifact I’d use to find the source of more. In a very meta moment, I added Sharpie S-Gel to the list I was writing… with a Sharpie S-Gel. Then I went and found my own. One cost about $2.50. The ones I’ve adopted as my brand have a metal barrel and a rose(ish) gold color, and they sit in two-packs basically anywhere there’s an office supply aisle. In my humble-pen opinion, it looks like an executive’s pen who might want it back.

Except this one’s mine, and nobody’s getting it back.

That’s the part that lands. It doesn’t look communal or borrowed. It looks chosen. It was like growing up, the quiet shift from whatever’s available to I know what I want and I’m allowed to pick it.

This isn’t a glow-up and it isn’t a lesson about treating yourself. It’s small by any measure, and I’ve romanticized the daylights out of it anyway. How old do you have to be before you get the room to move writing from a frenetic, income-centralized act to a thing you’re allowed to actually enjoy?

The pink Sharpie S-Gel hasn’t changed my life.

The cheap-pen desert I lived in was never the only option. The masses had this the whole time.

I just finally slowed down enough to look up and notice the door.