Shredding Journals
Asha Dornfest wrote about shredding her journals recently. 38 years of recorded thoughts… gone.
This is a topic I think about a lot. I keep a bullet journal and process my feelings mixed in with my daily tasks. I have journals going back to third grade. What do I do with this writing? It’s not the sort of thing you want people to read after you’re gone because it’s not the sort of thing you want people to read while you’re still here. I kind of wish those journals could be connected to my existence, and once I’m gone, they disappear in a puff of smoke. (Or some more environmentally-friendly option.)
The point is that you don’t know when you’re going to die, so waiting for a perfect last moment to destroy them means possibly waiting through the final moment I had to destroy them. So, do I do it now? Wait a few years? Write out my wishes and tack it to the front of each notebook? Trust people will respect my wishes?
I can’t imagine destroying my journals. And I can’t imagine keeping them. I’m stuck between these two thoughts. It’s not feasible to go through them and rip out certain pages. What bothers me today may be different from what bothers me in ten years.
Would you shred your journals?
3 comments
Um yes probably would shred some of my journals… Too embarrassing. I already tore out and destroyed a few particularly horrid pages – there is no value there either to myself or to others.
More recently (like, last few years) I’ve been doing bullet-journal where I aim to write down a sentence or 2 each day. It can be something as trivial as “took a kid to a soccer practice” or as weird as “my husband stepped on a groundhog this morning!”. It is more like a record of mundane daily things that are actually kind of fun to leaf through. Kids like to see what we did on today’s date 1, 2, 3 years ago…. Those journals I’ll keep and whoever inherits them after my death can decide if they want to burn them or keep them for posterity 😉
I have a few journals in a box in our storage locker, but I haven’t kept one in decades, and only sporadically, early in my marriage. The diaries/journals I kept from age 7 through university, on & off, WERE in a box in the closet of the bedroom that was mine during the year I lived with my parents before I got married. They aren’t there any more — I know because about 10 years ago, I helped my mom take everything out of the closet, weeded through it all (threw some stuff out, sent some to the thrift shop, etc.), wiped out all the shelves & then put back what was left — and the box wasn’t there. I can’t imagine they got thrown out — they are probably lurking in some dark corner of the crawl space, and I keep my eye out for them whenever I’m down there. I’ve also alerted my sister and asked her to keep an eye out for them.
As to your question — as a family historian, as a writer, I can’t imagine (I CRINGE) at the thought of shredding my journals. At the same time, I have no kids to pass them on to, and I doubt our nephews would care. They will probably get thrown out at that point. But I wouldn’t want some random person cleaning out my house to see them either. Sigh. There is certainly some cringeworthy stuff in there, but most of it is probably more laughable than truly embarrassing. I would love to find them and read them again and find out for sure!
I DO have all my calendars & datebooks, going back (gulp!) 50 years (that is not a typo). My grandmother did the same thing, later in her life, and my mother still has a few of them. They’ve come in really handy when trying to pinpoint the dates that certain things happened. In recent years, on top of the usual calendar/datebook stuff like birthdays, appointments, bills due, etc., I’ve often made notes (if there’s space) about what the weather was like, what we had for dinner, who I talked to on the phone, etc. When I was working, I wrote down what I wore — I don’t do that anymore, but I will sometimes note what I wore for a party or other special occasion, under the entry for the event. If it’s a wedding or birthday, etc., where we’re bringing a gift, I’ll write down what I brought, which has also been a handy reference!
I have kept so much stuff. It seems like I’ve been trying to pare down for a decade. I’ve kept sketch books and photo albums but no journals. I don’t keep my yearly planners either. Each year I get a new one, put my reusable cover on it, and throw the old one out.
If I had all of my journals from my life, I’d probably want to keep certain ones from important years. If I still had one, I’d definitely keep at least one journal from childhood–at the very least for the handwriting, haha.