Goodbye Journals!

#minimalism

#letting go of journals

(Aka The Summer I Realized it’s Kinder to the World *Not* to write a Memoir)

Hello world! How are you?? I just completed a huge shredding project, which resulted in letting go of 35 years of journals. I have just created enough rat nesting materials for a small village to set up an intricate camp.

Considering the slipshod and careless way I’ve stumbled through the years, having a nomadic soul, which resulted in dozens of moves, it seems no small miracle I had even been able to hold onto these journals at all.

I’ve been a minimalist forever, at least in theory, but those notebooks were always carefully preserved. Somehow they had survived many natural disasters… when I lived in a bread truck, which was the peak of chaos, when I encountering an ant invasion, then a roach invasion, a flood, a robbery, a tow (which teetered on being cost prohibitive to retrieve)…

Even a few years ago, when I was living in a partially constructed shed with only tarp separating me from many rainy nights, these boxes remained undisturbed, as if protected by some divine angel. Other of my boxes did get damaged, destroyed from rain finding its way inside, but not those journals… Maybe the fact that they remained completely intact, frozen in time from the first moment I put pen to paper, led me to believe they *must* have value. Although in 30 years, something always stopped me from getting into those boxes, I always thought they’d be there for me, to reveal an amazing life story of struggles and triumphs, once I became settled down enough to get to them.

I must have had some other intuition about them too. I vaguely remembered directionless scribbles, motivated by some strong yet ‘trivial in the scheme of things’ emotions long forgotten. A nagging irritation, too, that for every beautiful notebook i would pick out, upon completion of filling another, the value of its preciousness would seem to quickly depreciate once words started spilling onto it. In fact, the last ten years or so, the spiral bounds I chose were nondescript college-ruled, as if I could more easily live up to the expectations of a more common notebook.

Well, finally, a couple weeks ago, I broke into this project, having pared down every other material area of my life. Additionally I was motivated by watching my friend struggle with the towers of sentimental stuff he inherited when his mother died… I hated to think of leaving someone else with a similar burden…

So, a couple weeks ago, I tentatively popped off the lid of one of the two bulky boxes, and lifted out my oldest journal, dated 1984. It was a journal required by my high school class during a trip to Yosemite. A wondrous adventure, and my first time outside of Arkansas. The emotions I felt, riding on an airplane for the first time, were magical. The realization of a bigger world than I’d imagined, well… was beyond words. But the assignment was to journal, so journal I did.

My entries were guarded, polite, revealing how pretty I thought the scenery. Page after page, sometimes listing the botanical name of a flower prevalent to an area, sometimes naming a mountain range. As I was reading this notebook, I fell asleep. I figured maybe future writing would become more captivating. Wrong!

I scanned these pages, thinking at least I can maybe refer back, to see how far I’ve come. And there were some forays into literary exercises, a couple cringeworthy poems, one about roses holding their heads in shame during a rainy day, another about the trustworthiness of door hinges. I want to delete the scans so badly! But something stopped me. Nonetheless to at least shred all those pages, what a delight! As if being released from a scaly exoskeleton I’ve long ago outgrown… over the last several days, I spent hours slogging through all my old writing.

The content through the years did change…although the first couple journals were written as an assignment, the following were written only for myself. Of course writing for oneself is different than writing for an instructor, and so then, the quality of my writing indeed took an even more profound nose dive. The scribbles became dips into unparalleled self pity, deep sadnesses, and regrettably, painful cliches, and weak metaphors… the worst of it was in my early twenties, when my mental health was at its worse.

So the notebooks continued to be my only outlet. Luckily after the first 15 years of my journaling, I did find some great therapy and support groups, and so my writing cheered up significantly. But it was honestly no more interesting. I just was not able to say anything captivating back then!

Upon reflection, I do know where this earliest depression had come from. I was floundering because i had just graduated from high school as valedictorian, only a couple years earlier, only to discover this profound achievement, which I thought would throw open doors of exciting opportunity for me, landed me in no better of a space, only setting me up for a similar dreary academic path, where I would sit and listen to some professor ramble on incessantly about some specialty topic that had nothing to do with my life or current struggles. Honestly, i did not even like to read or study anything, aside from early artists and filmmakers. Even cooking for myself or getting enough sleep, or eating a nutritious meal was a profound challenge. Even worse, because I was years from being able to accomplish anything big again, I realized all the scholarships I had earned did nothing to fill the horrific spiritual void of which I had become fully aware.

Happily all this made the recent task of shredding all these cringeworthy passages so much easier. Over the last couple weeks, I’ve learned to shred with finesse, page after page vanishing, a moment in time long ago finally being put to rest. And I truly am grateful to open up space in my small studio, either for some new project, or just a breezeway, a task now removed from my nagging checklist.

Letting go of these bins that could have just as easily been ignored for now… but when my mortal soul takes leave of this world, I will not leave anyone else with the odious task of slogging through 30 years of groundhog’s days.

But here’s the thing. I did not realize it would trigger such grieving. The idea i’ve held onto for more than a decade, that I would take these notebooks and create an amazing memoir. I had a wrong idea that the passages would reflect my first nights at all the new cities I moved to, the colorful experiences when I first arrived in DC, or the French quarter, having decided to denounce materialism and live in my van that summer, or when I returned to Seattle and joined my Capitol Hill friends in opposition to the curfew put upon us during the WTO protests. Or what about the time when I adopted a little dog named Chance, who was shivering under a shrub one rainy night when I took him to his forever home, which I would later realize was his 14th birthday. These stories did not make it to my journals, for some reason, making it all the easier to feed the rubbish pages into the shredder. Upon threading, I didn’t even remember some of the people I was upset about, pining away that someone either didn’t call me or didn’t understand me. As I scanned the pages, it became a blur of repetitive circles. Loneliness, irritation, guy crazy stuff, broken diets… mundane stuff! I eventually lost al desire to scan them onto the hard drive and wanted to say a forever goodbye to moments that weren’t very interesting to begin with, and were long ago gone. Good riddance I say! My shredder would even go on regular protests, forced to take breaks to cool down…not even my shredder wanted to deal with these pages! Why did I waste so much time writing all that gibberish! Perhaps it was the knowledge that what I was spinning about wasn’t something resolvable, but misery or mundanity looking for a quiet home… this was not the wheat, but the chaff. Perhaps my dyslexic value system is to blame for this misunderstanding…

I suppose it hurts to let go of a delusion. Having imagined I’d been lugging around the rough draft of the Next Great American Novel is not an easy fantasy to let go. That plastic stack of tubs was my oversized lug of a talisman, my ‘at least I have my journals to remember and create an amazing book.’ Nostalgia I suppose, but is it nostalgia when it is reminding me of days that never were?

For this reason, I am grateful to have shredded all these notebooks!

I have to say, I did keep one notebook. But this is a fictional story, and I am convinced it will make a fine screenplay, once I find the right producer. It is a pithy tale of an angsty girl, who lived through tumultuous times, and is obsessed with writing about every little thing that happens to her, and somehow every victory over these petty little moments are woven together into something special.