If you’re like me, you keep a journal. Actually if you’re like me, you have over 30 years of journals, stored in boxes in the garage. What do you plan to do with all that material? What if you don’t want people to see them, but you drop over dead and there they are? What if your state secrets get into the wrong hands?
I love reading my old stuff – except sometimes it backfires. I wrote about that here. Now I’m thinking that maybe I should pick a certain milestone birthday in the future and start weeding through all those years and years of scribbling (longhand, often in fountain pen) and cull the best parts for my family. Make it into one book, a personal one, of course. Print it at the local office supply store. Then get rid of everything else. Maybe spend the night in a campground with girl buddies, our RVs circling a campfire, and feed the rejected pages into the flames.
What about you? Do you have years of journals and if so, what do you plan to do with them?
PS: Apologies to those who read this post in its earlier form. I drafted, scheduled, and forgot about it. Oops! Hope it makes more sense now.
I have kept journals for decades. When I am trying to solve a problem, I write in my journal regularly. When I had a back injury, I documented the things I tried (physical therapy) and the results. This was very helpful to me later when I needed to recreate the timeline of the injury and the ineffective treatments prior to meeting with a neurosurgeon. My journals are handwritten in Moleskin booklets, and I put the dates on the front page so when I have to find something, I can quickly figure out which journal it is in. They have a practical purpose in addition to helping me think through an issue I’m working on.
Do you envision an outcome for them when you are very old, Kate?
All my old journals are in pages and pages of spiral, lined notebooks that are disintegrating, but I can’t bare to part with them. Let me know if you can figure out a way to restore them without typing out each line. ha I also want to digitize old photos, but who has the energy for that? The most challenging part about any art is how to find time to isolate and create while remaining simultaneously engaged with life and others at the same time.
You are so right, Pat! For all our good intentions, everything has a price in terms of time, energy, and usage. I’m hoping by the time I’m ready to have that bonfire, voice recognition equipment will make it fairly easy. But as for the digitizing of photos, I did some of that, but I still have a small library of photo albums in a cabinet in the garage. Guess which one anybody ever looks at? The digital ones may as well be lost; there are so many and we never really think to look at them. But pull out a binder and pore over it–that’s the good stuff.
In response to the comments about digitized photos, I’ve thought the same thing about photos that are just sitting there on the computer –though it’s not like I look at the regular kind very often, either.
Here’s what I’ve started doing: every month I change the background on my computer to one of the digitized photos, so I can enjoy them individually. Right now, I have a close-up of emus, with two of them looking right into the camera, from when I did a Kansas farm crawl a couple of years ago. It makes me smile every time I start my computer or go to the desktop.
Love it! And that would remind you of the rest of the trip, which would prompt you to look at all of them. Good idea.
Oh my goodness. I feel the same way. I am also sentimentally attached to most of the journal covers. They are so beautiful, it’s hard to let go. Some I poured over before selecting, some I snapped up immediately, and some were gifts.
And… as I look at them, moving them from one box to another until I “decide” what to do with them, I invariably find journals I began with a certain purpose, wrote a few pages, and moved on to another journal. At least in those, I can remove those pages, and reuse.
A ceremonial burning sounds inviting.
Wouldn’t that be fun? Somebody who has a business catering to women in relation to introspection, reinvention, and the “spiritual journey” should feature such an opportunity.
I don’t keep a journal except when I travel. But, I do have both my mother’s and father’s journals they kept before WWII, before they met, when they met and married and for many years after they met. These journals are just about my most cherished belongings… I’d probably try to save my husband first if there was a fire – then the journals.
How precious they must be. My mom has letters written to her by my dad before they married, but she won’t let me read them. I teased that they must be steamy, but she said no, just private. I hope to change her mind about this.
Let’s just remember not to park our rigs too close to that campfire! If we all brought our journals…it might become quite the conflagration! Since I started writing Morning Pages…21 years ago this month…I also have many large notebooks of writing. They come in handy when trying to pinpoint, as others have mentioned, exactly when something happened in my life. Synchronistically, almost 20 years ago, when reading…FROM AGE-ING TO SAGE-ING by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi…I was inspired to consider my life in 7-year segments that he suggested could correspond to the months in a year. In other words, ages 0-7 are January, 8-14 February, and so on. When we reach age 57, we begin the “autumn” of our lives, and ages 64-70 October, which is where I am now, is when “the time for harvesting arrives.” I LOVED the idea of doing a “life review” with this perspective in mind. I immediately created a hand-made chart that I began to use to keep track of life milestones. Today I have created a more “user friendly” chart where “at a glance” I can tell you the year, and possibly the exact date that something I value as important in my life happened. My journals have been invaluable in this process.
Sue, what a motivating idea! I want to do that, too. Thanks for telling us. And your comment about the size of the fire made me laugh.
I have journals and books of poetry dating back 50+ years. As I prepare my self for the last major move in my life, in 18 months, this is a topic that bears careful consideration. My dad’s journals [he kept from age 10 to age 95!] were supposed to come to me, but my sister appropriated them..
The idea of a ritual burning appeals to me.
Ginger, were you able to read his journals? 85 years! That motivates me to write more about current events (in the context of my life) than, say, my struggles with dieting! Also, you might want to look at Janice’s comment, and my reply to her, for another idea: donation.
I don’t have kids, so have had to ponder what to do with journals dating back to the 1970s. I don’t want to toss them because it’s been enlightening for me to go back and read about, say, what concerned me the most when I was in my 20s. They’ve been a corrective to my faulty memory about certain occurrences. More importantly, they’ve help me put my life in perspective and understand how I got to be who I am.
Also, as an archivist, I’ve worked at manuscript collections that contained these very items–they’re social history. They’re of historical interest because they detail what life was like for everyday women (and journals were almost always by women) in a certain time and place. You don’t have to be important for your writings to be meaningful. The challenge for me is that I can’t donate my decades of journals locally because I know the people who work at these repositories. I don’t want my archival contemporaries reading about my teenage angst!
I did contact this institution and they were interested:
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture
library.duke.edu/rubenstein/bingham
What a great idea, Janice. Based on that, I took a sidetrip down the Google rabbithole and found this, which I’m going to share with Ginger, above: http://www2.archivists.org/publications/brochures/donating-familyrecs
And I think it’s important to consider whether your teenage journals might have served their purpose – for me, I wrote to ease emotional pain.
But OTOH, I wonder if you might offer redacted materials to writer friends? I’m speaking only of the treasure of your memories that can’t be used anywhere else…too precious to simply discard.
I feel remiss for not including the link that you provided! Thank you for adding that.
My pleasure.
I burn mine. I re-read. Then burn.
In that order? Don’t your fingers get all charcoaly?
Just kidding. But I like the element of fire. Very symbolic of purification and rebirth.
Wow, now that’s a thought-provoking question! I have kept journals during my most painful times of transition—I always found that it helped me through them. But I don’t want my loved ones to feel the pain of my experiences. I don’t think it serves them in any way. I do want to keep some passages, however, since they remind me of the meaningful times in my life. So I just cut out some pages…easy to do (using an Xacto knife). But who knows what will happen to these journals, once I am gone? I’ll leave it to my decendents to ponder!
Hi Diane, Peggy, Libby (and everybody else who saw this post before I realized it went public), I came up with what I think is a lovely idea for dealing with them. (see post again; it’s been updated). Of course, if I get hit by a bus first, all bets are off.
For some reason, a good friend needed to know the month she got divorced twenty years ago. She knew the year but not the month and couldn’t find the paperwork. She said to herself: I bet Libby wrote about it in her journal. She called me. I found my journals from that year and sure enough I’d written that her divorce was final. So I helped out a friend and enjoyed remembering that time in our friendship. lol
Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful! I’ve often wished my (handwritten, pen-and-ink) journals were searchable. (BTW, the post was a draft that sneaked out when my back was turned. I’ve added to it.)
Hmmm….something to think about! I’m a sporadic journaler so don’t have that many stockpiled. And once I’m gone, I don’t really care who might read them. So maybe I won’t think about it after all! 🙂
Hi Roxanne, at first I sort of blanched at the thought of you not caring about the wreckage in your wake (oh, I kid the Boomer Haiku Lady!), but then I remembered my friend lamenting the futility of trying to teach her husband to pay the bills; he’s always relied on her to do that. Suddenly she looked up at me, awareness dawning. “Why do I care if I’m dead and my house goes into foreclosure?” We laughed ourselves sick.