Letting Go of Old Journals and Mementos
But is the story of discarded journals a tale of freedom or a missed chance to stroll down memory lane? To leave something of yourself behind?
In our teenage days, a friend of mine faithfully documented her life in a daily journal. In our twenties, we spent some time reading from our respective journals and laughing, and even shedding a tear or two for those awfully confused girls we used to be. But before she relocated to another country, she decided to throw away all her journals. I remember wanting to keep them for her, convinced they were pieces of a unique history that will never be again. But she didn’t seem at all conflicted; she said they were her past, and she doesn’t need them anymore. Besides, she added, it wasn’t the happiest time of her life anyway.
Years later, with two kids each added to our lives, I asked her if she ever regretted throwing them out. Wouldn’t her kids want to read them? Her response, a cool, "No, and I am not that person anymore anyway.”
Another friend did the same, also when she moved to live in another country and start a new life. Her journals were more recent; she also didn’t think there was any reason to lug all that past around. She still journals, in her new life.
It struck me as a profound sense of freedom – the act of releasing the past, a life she was no longer living. I wished and still wish I could do it.
But is the story of discarded journals a tale of freedom or a missed chance to stroll down memory lane? To leave something of yourself behind?
Throughout my life, I've always had a journal on the go. As a young preteen and teen, my journal served as a lifeline, taking the form of "Dear Diary" entries that evolved into extensive, elaborate reflections mainly centered around my friendships and typical growing pains. Through the complex phases of my teenage years and into adulthood, journaling has been my go-to for analyzing my thoughts.
To echo Joan Didion's sentiment:
“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
Apart from my own thoughts, I've also been (and to an extent still am) a collector of mementos, meticulously archiving everything, right down to movie theater stubs. I used to organize multiple binders filled with memories, ranging from high school essays to emails exchanged with a friend (pre-dating free email services, sent to my work email account, so I printed them all). I even preserved printed copies of forwarded jokes, capturing a time when email forwards were novel and amusing.
Due to my job requiring overseas travel in my twenties and thirties, my collection of memories remained stored (and added to) in my apartment in my hometown, patiently awaiting my return. Fortunately, the onset of CDs, external hard drives, and cloud storage diminished my need for physical collections, but still, there was a lot of stuff.
Around five years ago, my husband and I quit our jobs working internationally, returning to my hometown for a while. Thus, I was reunited with my collection of mementos, but somewhat surprisingly, it no longer held the same significance. With a growing family and limited space in our apartment, I easily let go of physical mementos, including many of the books (thank you Kindle!). I digitized important emails, now residing in my "mementos" folder in the cloud and backed up in various hard drives.
A decorative box with a few physical mementos still remains, but I realize that I will probably never look at it again. Why keep it then? I don’t know. While I'm trying to reduce the number of my possessions, there's still a lot I'm not ready to let go of.
My current mode of collecting follows the heavily modified to my own needs Zettelkasten method. I do this in bursts of interest, but otherwise, it just sits there in my “digital garden” in Obsidian without occupying (too) much of my mental space.
I wrote about “digital gardeners” here.
However, my old journals remain on a hard-to-reach shelf in my bedroom, and I find myself uncertain about what to do with them. I rarely revisit them. They represent a bygone era.
I don’t know if you’ve tried reading your old journals, but for me, mostly they are cringy—a person I once was, and I don’t always like her very much. My journals are also a collection where I pasted physical mementos, drawings, ticket stubs, magazines, or newspaper clippings. Some of that is interesting, but maybe there is a better use for that shelf.
Do I need to keep those journals? Could I ever just let go of them?
I continue to journal, with varying frequency. Sometimes I will journal consecutively for weeks, sometimes I won’t write anything for a month. I habitually carry a notebook to jot down thoughts, usually dedicating one notebook to anything that needs to be written and jotted down by hand until it's completed.
However, it takes longer to fill a notebook now. While I manage my tasks, to-dos, calendars, and note-taking digitally—everything a notebook used to do for me—I still find solace in traditional journaling. Especially in the mornings, when I tend to pour out my thoughts and worries onto the empty page as a form of release, it always calms me down. That conversation with myself allows me to think.
While the conventional wisdom is to let go of "morning pages" and not revisit them, I find myself hesitant to dispose of them.
I wish I could release them, let go, every time I complete a notebook, throw it away. I grapple with the impact on my mental space – the weight of holding onto the past in a tangible form.
And, I remind myself, it will all be trash once I am gone. My handwriting is too difficult to read, so I don’t think my children ever will, even if they wanted to.
But still, as I leaf through them every now and then, it's interesting to see just how many themes repeat, how many issues I never work through, how many plans never come true, and how many worries resolve themselves without my input. Life truly does happen while we are busy making other plans, worrying about things that never happen, trying to be someone else, more adjusted, happier, more like what we think others are.
There are lessons there, I know.
I will end with this thought from Joan Didion’s Diaries, which I relate to so much (down to the daughter).
Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.
Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.
And maybe this is it: not taking life in the moment as it presents itself. Perhaps that is why it's so hard for me to let go of my journals, while it was so easy for my friends once they started a new life. For now, my journals get to stay, but someday, who knows, maybe.
How about you? What are your reasons for keeping or not keeping your old journals?
After drafting my memoir, I pulled out my grade school diary hoping to find some good fodder to fill in the memory gaps...a whole lotta cringy nothing. I can’t let go of my journals either, although my friend has a pact with her friend that whoever dies first has the task of going to the other’s house to destroy her journals.
The keep-or-toss journal dilemma remains largely unresolved. At some point, cringey or not, I feel as if I may need to remember myself, so I stash the notebooks in my attic, along with my late mom’s and grandmother’s. I’m the last in the family writing legacy and the journals will likely stay undiscovered. I’m okay with that.