Every Monday I post Real Life Minimalists, a profile of one of my readers in their own words (click here for details).
This week, we have a very interesting story from Louisa Rogers . She tells us how she’s tackling a particularly difficult decluttering challenge—the journals she’s kept since childhood. (Louisa also has a website, if you’d like to learn more about her.)
Louisa writes:
Louisa
The year I was nine, I received my first diary. It was pink and pocket-size, with a gold latch and key. I recorded what I got for my birthday (a Tower watch), my teachers (Miss Eckhert and Mr. Brow), and which sister won the game of Monopoly (Arabella).
Fifty years later, I still keep a journal. On its lined pages I ask, plan, dream, storm and mull. Journaling has been my partner all my life. Exploring my meandering thoughts on the written page is not just helpful, it is purgative. And fun. My life would be thinner without the call of the open page.
Over the years I amassed cartons and cartons of journals that I schlepped from town to town, state to state, and country to country. I keep the journals, well, because you do. What’s the point, otherwise? They’re the record of my life. They’re, um, “me.”
Every once in awhile, over the years, I would think of the dusty cartons taking up more and more shelf space down in a myriad of basements, and imagining them gone, a sense of freedom and weightlessness would come over me. I mentioned this to my sister, who has planted herself deep in the same plot of North Carolina soil for 35 years. “But you can’t throw your journals away!” said Jane. “You can’t! I’ll store them for you!”
“What, ship them all to you?” I said, idly wondering which would be cheaper—USPS, UPS or FedEx? Any way I did it, sending them all the way from California would be an expensive embarrassment.
Keeping a journal is one thing; revisiting it is another. On the rare occasion when I descend into the cave of an old journal, I usually surface feeling morose, relieved to be back in the sunlight. All that drama! All that venting! True, every once in, oh, 30 pages, I’ll come upon an absolute pearl, and I’ll think, “God, I was brilliant!” But then, along with that comes, “But where did that brilliance go? How come I keep forgetting?”
I debated for years (all the while accumulating yet more journals) letting go of them. Always, I hesitated. I respect the value of documentation. Where would history be without records? And who knows? Maybe 100 years from now someone might come upon my journals and read with rapt interest what life was like in the 60s, 70s and 80s, just as we read diaries of the pioneers, or Civil War memoirs.
Plus, who would I be without my journals? On the other hand, letting go of them might set me free. That weightless feeling…
Back and forth I went. In one stage I tore out random pages from old journals and collaged them. But that only took care of a few pages.
Finally, somehow, I decided: for now, I’d keep all the journals up to age 30, and out of the rest, pick 15 to let go.
“How about selling them on eBay?” my husband said. Yes! Less final, less abrupt than dumping them. And I liked the idea of someone else taking care of them–at a price, even! And find them fascinating, I hoped. I imagined the reader (man? woman? either would do; I wasn’t picky) poring over my journal pages late at night, looking up occasionally and staring out of the window into the darkness, wondering about this mysterious, compelling woman.
Yes. Well. We can dream, right? I suspect the guy who wrote was hoping for something racier. He didn’t bite, and there was no late-hour bidding war.
So I gave my husband the 15 journals, with the agreement that if within two months, I had not asked for them back, he would ‘release’ them (the phrase ‘throw away’ made me wince). Out of respect for my earlier self, I tore out random pages and collaged them into my art journal. So who-I-was-then is grafted into my current life.
(For the record, I never did ask him for the journals. I forgot all about them. So they have met their maker.)
Fifteen journals lighter, fifteen pounds lighter. Now I only have another 60 or so to go….
Collage of Louisa's journal pages
{If you’d like to learn more about minimalist living, please consider reading my book, The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide, or subscribing to my RSS feed.}
I’m going through a similar purge of old journals but i wrecked my shredder in the process so im waiting for winter (its summer here in australia) when i will burn them in the wood heater. i thought i was such a good writer but, rereading them now, realise how crap it really was. kind of like adrian mole but not as amusing.
I LOVE this post! I have a box of journals from age 11 through to maybe 25 (although by then, entries were only every couple of months, maybe even a year apart.) Before I became a parent, I often thought about binning them.
After getting in touch with an old teen friend and debating the facts of some situation, I went back to them to read them.
It was amazing to read about my teen self and to remember how dramatic and “raw” everything is in those teen years – the heartache of friendships changing, boys entering the scene, the pressures of school (I was a straight-A student) and, most importantly, my parents’ unhappy marriage. I remember myself as a calm, mature and happy teen but the journals show that there was lot going on under that happy not-quite-facade.
After reading them, again I thought I might bin them.
I decided not to. They only take up one small box in my attic. I have two daughters, aged 4 and 2 at the moment. They will be teens in a decade and I want to reread the diaries again at that point. I want to remember and FEEL the pain I felt back then so I can maybe understand the dramas I expect will arise in my daughters’ lives, no matter how well-adjusted and calm they seem.
After that, I will bin them – they will have served their purpose then.
:-)
Karen (Scotland)
PS My Gran died early last year and my mum has been slowly reading through her diaries. Not journals, just week-per-page little diaries that give an occasional glimpse into my Gran’s quiet opinions. She has found it a comfort.
PPS Sorry, done nothing for the cause of minimalism with this comment… ;-)
Don’t agree Karen – the whole point of minimalism is to keep only what you really really cherish – seems like your journals fit the bill…
Karen, I really connected with your purpose of remembering your teenaged self for your children. As a teenager I felt so very alone and journaling was my only “friend.” At 17 I actually wrote that I would keep those pages so that I could go back as a parent to help bridge that understanding to my child’s feelings, because, clearly (LOL), nobody understood what I was going through and all the adults had forgotten how raw it felt to be a teen. Going back now (my child is 12) to take a look it’s all so self-absorbed and dramatic, and I’m so glad that I’ve learned how very short-term those feelings are. I’ve found those journals have indeed served their purpose, and once my child is past the teenaged years I will gratefully lay them to rest.
Ah, journals. I agree that if they are precious to you, and tidily corralled, you should keep them! Or go through them and note the gems in a new journal, with a frank note to yourself (or future reader) that these were highlights – the remainder was not particularly worth keeping.
That said, I kept my teenage journals until I was 40, when they went to the shredder. I had hauled them through and around 4 states, and both a desire to be done with the past and to be lighter for the future took hold. (I already didn’t have much in my nostalgia box, and this would pare it down more.) I did also think of my eventual demise and I didn’t want my husband to either become too attached to the ramblings of my youth or to have to figure out how to dispose of them, so they went into the shredder. I don’t regret it..!
Ultimately, do what feels right for you. If you end up with a streamlined life save for a couple of boxes of journals, maybe that’s where your minimalist “set point” is!
A, I have a big note in the top of my box telling anyone that the box is mine, mine only, is only to be read by me and no-one else is ever to read them, even if (especially if) I am dead! At that point, they are instructed to bin the whole lot without reading.
I can only hope my husband/children will honour that if I die.
There is nothing written that shames me but definitely a lot that would embarrass me!
Karen
This is an interesting post to me because I used to keep tons of journals as a girl and teen. After college I finally got rid of them because I realized that the “process of journaling” is the most important part to me. Purging all those emotions onto the page is good for me emotionally, but why do I want to hold onto a bunch of angry rants from a not so pleasant era of my life? The main reason why I threw them out was not because of the space so much, but because I didn’t want anyone in my family to read them one day and be hurt by any hateful things I said about them in a fit of rage.
I do keep sketchbooks though, which will be harder for me to dispose of. When I was younger they were more of a visual diary, although now I use them more for planning for finished paintings. Right now, they fill up a bankers box plus I have a few extra filled books. I think I might save them until my daughter is old enough to flip through them and appreciate them. Then I will throw them out as well.
“After college I finally got rid of them because I realized that the “process of journaling” is the most important part to me.”
This has been my experience as well. That is why, when I get angry or frustrated, I take five minutes to do stream of consciousness writing. Just type of anything and everything in my head, nonstop until time is up. Very cathartic. Then I can delete my vents. All the benefits of journaling without the clutter.
I read through my very first journal recently. I am very willing to let it go because I realised I wasn’t a very nice kid at 12 and I wrote horrible things about people whom I actually care about very much. Talk about hormones and teenage angst. I still journal now and I too have a heavy box that I am not sure what to do with. What I’ve been doing this year is using my yearly planner as a daily journal so I am restricted to one page per day and also use it as a planner.
Lolly, that’s precisely the reason I want to hold on to mine. I realised that I vented a lot in my journals – I am still an impatient person and I don’t suffer fools gladly but I now have the control that comes with adulthood. I suspect my eldest daughter will be very similar to me and I want to be able to remind myself that I was once judgemental without wisdom and I saw the world in stark black and white.
But, yes, hormones and teenage angst – ow-ee!
Karen (Scotland)
I do like writing journals, but I don’t feel like I should keep them for such a long time. That’s because I generally look back and lament at what I had, how much younger I seemed, but also thinking “Do I really sound like that?” that’s one of the reasons I deleted all of my chat logs on the internet. I just didn’t like how aggressive and forward I was in my early teens. Ah well, they were still a little amusing to look back on.
I could not imagine purging all of those, Louisa. That must have been an emotional roller-coaster. Well done :)
Well, you could at least admit that you find it “funny”!!! HAHA. I always miss my teenage journals.
I mean, it’s so funny how we sounded so ignorant of the entire world before and yet, we think as if we already know everything.
You should just scan them into your computer and get rid of them. That way you can look through them if you want but you still have your daily life and all that work preserved.
This was exactly what I was going to recommend. I could not agree with you more. It seems so much more convenient to retain them and re-read them this way.
Wouldn’t that just convert physical clutter into digital clutter?
I was also going to suggest scanning, if the journals mean that much to someone. While digital clutter IS clutter, it takes up much less space, if someone truly wants to keep them.
Yes! Scanning is the solution. Put it on Evernote or elsewhere. That way you can declutter your home and keep precious information. You can still sell the book – but digital. People might be able to read them in 100 years or more.
Digital stuff only becomes clutter if you don’t know how to find the information. I store everything in Evernote. I can therefore search for everything. That is key for me. I don’t have to waste time with organising (although I can). But I can retrieve something I look for as long as I have a few keywords.
I haven’t yet tried to store handwritten stuff, but Evernote claims to make it (partially) searchable. That way you might be able to search for a brilliant idea you had earlier.
“Digital stuff only becomes clutter if you don’t know how to find the information. ”
I disagree. For me, the biggest benefit of getting rid of my clutter has been to let go of all the “shoulds” that are associated with them – it’s mental clutter. This has been just as true for my carefully-organized digital files as for my physical stuff.
i was lucky enough to lack the “journal gene”, along with the girly one and the need to want a child one too! it seemed like journaling was too much work for me and never got into it. what i did however was knit-and saw my life in what i made. my first barbie dress i made when i was 4, a hat i made that i was so proud of, a sweater i made that came out surprising well-are you really going to wear that?? sure am mom, and wore it i did most of my hs years. the blanket i made when my dog passed away and needed to hold myself together and grieve over. (i kept this)
time has passed and they still have a place in my heart. i guess these were my “journals”. hopefully they are still in use or as reclaimed yarn. it’s also nice to know i can give away an item rather than hide it-but still know all it’s secrets.
I burned mine. Ugh, just browsing through the teen ones made me feel bad..
I have written a little bit while pregnant with my daughter, and then about her, which I intend to keep for her, and it’s just a couple of diaries as I don’t write that often. I have a notebook where my mom wrote about me, and I read it after she passed away, and it made me cry and I was grateful for the love she expressed and the stories she told about when I was small. I’m keeping that one also.
Yes, I’ve mostly shredded mine, but not before being in awe of their high drama. ;-) What I did keep are the written memories that I transcribed almost as if I was a reporter, without “me” all over the page. They give me a snapshot of my past, almost as powerful as photos. I also have kept a few of the letters and cards that my mom wrote to me, as I find them indescribably precious.
This really struck a cord with me, I’m glad I’m not the only one! Although I only wrote my journals from age 14-17, I have always taken that box of books with me, never read them, worried about what would happen to them if I popped off this mortal coil at short notice. A few weeks ago, in a major purge, I finally started reading them. I was expecting at least some witty Adrian Mole account of my teenage years and was quite saddened by what a predictable teen I was (“I hate my parents! I hate my teachers! I fancy so-and-so (this week)”) Oh dear!! As with Louisa, there was the occasional gem in there, but they were sadly few and far between. I tore them all up and put them in the recycling box – my writing was so undecipherable to anyone but me, and the content so dull they didn’t justify using the shredder and all that electricity! Not only do I now have that little bit of extra space, but I don’t have to worry about them being part of legacy – I had visions of my nieces sorting through my stuff and lighting on them with enthusiasm and curiosity, only to realise a couple of pages in that this wasn’t “Catcher in the Rye”, and Aunty wasn’t so nice when she was a teenager :)
I wrote a journal once for a whole year, for the first time in my life. When I reviewed it at the end of the said year, I was actually embarrassed at how “boring” my life was! ;-)
Wow, journals are hard. Great post.
I wonder as the electronic age gets more and more widespread if we will still be data hoarders and not notice as much because it doesn’t take up space. Knowing it is all there in the basement might not be all that different than trying to save thousands of pictures in electronic form that won’t get looked at again. Less space, but probably still that ‘weight’ of knowing it is all there.
After reading the comments, I’m so glad that I’m not alone in feeling “embarrassed” at my former self. I threw away all of my old journals, and even my year books this past year and haven’t regretted it for one second. Whenever I’d read them, I’d cringe at what was important to me and how whiny I sounded. Ugh. I did not find any pleasure out of rereading them, so I got rid of them. I love having more space! Oh, and I’d be embarrassed if someone came across them when I die.
ooh, I managedd to purge the journals, but I still haven’t purged the yearbooks. I could use some inspiration there.
Darlena,
Before I purged my yearbooks, I tried to think of the last time I truly sat down and looked through them, and I couldn’t remember the last time. It’s been several years since I’ve been in school and I remember thinking during the time that it would be so fun to look at them years down the road, but then several years down the road I forgot all about them. That justified right there that I didn’t need them. :) I’ve also been communicating with high school and college friends and reminiscing over a bottle of wine about the “good ole days” instead of looking at pictures of those days (ie: creating new memories while remembering old ones). :)
Hope that helps! :)
Katie
I’ve also thrown away my old journals and yearbooks. I’m not sentimental, and keeping big tomes of pictures of high school peers, most of them I didn’t know, didn’t appeal to me. Plus my journals were an embarrassment to read. I can’t believed how “special” I thought I was. I was unique and gifted and no one understood me and this and that…oh brother. Luckily my handwriting is illegible to everyone but me so there was no fear of someone reading it; still, I’m glad to kick my dramatic teenage self to the curb.
I could really relate to this post. Louisa, we are the same age and I have the same number of journals. Re-reading some of them makes me cringe. I don’t have kids … so no need to keep them for a “legacy” of what life was like. I’m scanning certain passages of interest, but letting them go (hello, shredder!). It was tough at first (some of the notebooks were so pretty! some of my observations so pithy! life then was so different from now! Et cetera), but I’m glad I’m doing it. I’d hate to die unexpectedly and have someone else read them. This was I can make sure they are disposed of properly.
I was thinking about something like this over the weekend. I’ve kept lots of old Christmas/birthday cards, as well as letters from my boyfriend that he sent me in the early stages of our relationship. Part of me wants to be totally minimalist and just get rid of them, shed the clutter. But another part of me loves to look back, reminisce and remind myself of old times. I don’t know if I could bring myself to throw it all away. For example, if my grandad suddenly passed away, I’d want to make sure I had the cards he’s sent me in the past. Just as I have old birthday and Christmas cards from my nanna. I know my memories are in my head, but it sometimes takes looking at a card or reading a letter to bring those memories to the forefront.
It’s a tough one. It’s something that I can see myself grappling with for some time yet!
Rebecca, my mom passed on last year at age 95 (my father at 85). I’d downsized her from her home, assisted living, then board and care. There wasn’t much left after the b&c, but I found an envelope filled with all the love letters my mother and father had written one another during their engagement as they lived far apart in different states. What a treasure! So fun to read now!
I am so sorry you feel burdened by your journals. I would give absolutely anything to have a journal from my grandmothers; and my husband’s grandmothers. David McCullough said that we are losing a whole lot of history because no one keeps journals anymore, and that if you want to be remembered leave your journals and letters to a library. Most people’s journals are similar, lots of boring, mundane stuff with occasional pearls of brilliance, but that’s what makes them so valuable for future readers. I read my thirty years of journal entries and am amazed at how very much the same person I truly am, and yet how much I’ve matured and gained in experience and wisdom. There are so many things I forget, and somethings I can prove by the entries in my journal. Your posterity (oh, maybe you’re one of those who don’t have or want any) will be grateful for the records you kept of your life.
I have been going through a similar thing with old photos, I have so many of them and in boxes, they have been languishing in my basement. I am going through them and editing the ones I want to keep, choosing the ones I still remember the people in. Meanwhile I have acquired all of my husband’s grandmother’s photos. There are suitcases and boxes full of them, and we have no idea who some of these people are. I am hesitant to edit these pictures, but edit I must, I will probably put all the pictures with unidentified people in them in one box and take to another relative for them to “appreciate”. Why is it so hard to let go of our memories?
I was having sentiments about journals today. It’s really hard. I miss my journals so bad. I actually burned them before I discovered minimalism. It’s a long story but I just kept burning journals throughout the years AND now I realized how I wished I kept them. :) Don’t give up on them. Or if you would, you could scan them first at the very least!!!
Journals are hard. For the last 10 years or so, my journaling has all been done on the computer, which is nice in that it doesn’t take up an extra physical space. I still have hardcopy journals that I don’t want to purge. Some of the entries make me feel the angst you and others have described above, but others are great reminders of things and experiences I had forgotten about. My memory is so terrible that I’m afraid to lose these reminders altogether. I’ve been retyping my old journals (luckily there are only 5 or so) little by little so they too can be kept digitally.
I have one large shelf of journals (and a box of calendars) going from 1997 (age 16) to today (age 31). I love looking back at them, though I don’t do it often. I was actually reading some entries this weekend from a few years ago to settle a discussion with my partner. Finding a reference to the conversation I was looking for was an unnecessary perk – the real gem was watching myself cautiously falling in love with him. I don’t find old journals depressing or embarrassing. I have a lousy memory, and they’re a precious way of remembering my life. Not just remembering what happened, but filling in the emotions I was feeling. I’d love to scan them and use software to make the text searchable. It would be a huge task, but it would make them so much more useful! Right now my problem is that 2011 makes them too big to fit on one shelf!
I have years of journals as well, and I need to address them. Much of my writing is repetitive, dealing with the agony of depression, self-guilt, and trying to find myself. I have moved beyond a lot of that. I may read through them one more time, and then decide if they were worth keeping for myself. I am not sure that I would ever want anyone else to read them, so there is that worry that once I am gone, someone would come across them, in book format or digital format, and read them.
Then again, it may be healing for me to see the progress that I have made…
Bernice
Living and thriving with depression
I really haven’t kept a journal, however, just this past week I burned my report cards. My mom had kept everyone and passed them on to me. I decided that if I were to suddenly snuff it I really wouldn’t want anyone knowing that I got a B in Art in kindergarten (that isn’t actually the worst thing that was in them!) I also burned all of my old passports. I did find it kind of liberating.
I’d love to throw my journals away. But I’m afraid to. They are only a few as I wasn’t disciplined about keeping them. But unfortunately, I’m very forgetful and a lot of information is gone. Likely due to a lot of difficulties over some of those years as a teenager/20-something. So I suspect some of that info will never come back. Yet again, I feel as if I want to be free of the past. Perhaps if I throw them away/shred them, I can be happier and sort of rewrite my history.
A great and thought-provoking post. Keeping journals is one of those decluttering issues that people can become very divided over. But really, they are just the “pointy end” of any decluttering decision. Some things are easy to keep or purge; others are harder. It all comes down to the same thing – making a decision on what is useful or valuable to us, and letting go of the rest. Sure, journals can be important for historical value (that is, if you actually want others to read your writings) or sentimental value (going back to read them), but remember that ultimately, all of life’s stuff (whether vase or item of clothing or journal) is transient. What matters most is getting stuck into your life as it is now. And I understand the anguish of letting go of something and then wishing you had it back (I’ve done that with a fringed suede jacket from my teenage years, of all things!), and I need to keep reminding myself to live in the present!
I am another long time journaler. First things first is that if journals are the biggest part of your clutter problem be thankful. Only you can decide if they are important enough to keep or not. Minimalism doesn’t necessarily mean getting rid of everything, just the things we don’t need or love. My goal when I get to all those packed up old journals will be to start a blog – read through and post those pearls and let the rest go.
I too was a journaler. I’m only 20 though, but until recently had journals since 1999 (making me 8 or 9). I had always felt that if my house were on fire and had to grab my “3 items” my enormous box of journals would be one of them.
Then they started weighing on me and taking up space as I got further into my minimalist journey. I thought about scanning them. Didn’t do that. Next option was typing them up into the computer. So I tried it. With every entry I wrote, I kept feeling this overwhelming sneaky feeling. Like I shouldn’t be doing it. Reading about past relationships, depressing feelings, things people write about when they need to get things off their chest. Just stuff that adds absolutely nothing to my future. Not only that, but brought me down when I was rereading them. One day before I realized this, (since he knew I had been rereading them to copy them) my fiance was talking to me about how he felt like I was living in the past with my journals and how dearly I held on to them. At first I was a little defensive until I thought about how I was feeling when I was rereading them to type them up. He was right. What I wrote were past emotions usually somewhat depressing being a teenager and all. There really was nothing of value there. I had always journaled in the past to either get things off my chest or just record my life, because I felt like I would forget one day. Then my fiance said something (during the same conversation) that I really had never thought of and kind of stuck with me. He told me something along the lines of the things you remember, you remember them for a reason. Not every detail of life is supposed to be remembered or special. It makes room for remembering things that are actually special. The events in life that were important enough shaped who you are today, so you don’t really need to hold on to the journals to find that out how you got there.
I don’t know, he had a much better way of explaining it than I can remember since it has been a few months. It gave me the push I needed to just be done with my past and throw out my journals. When I threw out my journals I hadn’t been journaling for about 2 years. I was ready to start fresh with my new life since I’m much, much happier now and honestly don’t really have a need to journal. I know this isn’t the reason everyone journals, but I can say that I haven’t regretted throwing them out for a second. I feel like such a HUGE weight has been lifted off of me. I know it won’t be as easy for everyone (trust me I definitely did struggle with it), but I pulled the trigger, and haven’t looked back.
Great post and great comments! Louisa’s journal’s collage looks very pretty. Not everyone has the same type of journals.
I am heartened to find out that I am not alone in finding my old journal entries whiny and dull.
Although I did not write regularly, I managed to amass a collection of grievances and complaints, sprinkled with (few) insightful thoughts and a lot of insecurity. I definitely did not want anyone to see them.
A couple of years ago, I decided to shred all of my journals. At the moment, I felt a sense of freedom. The day after, I felt a little bereft. And then a little anxious: what if I needed to go back to them and check an important event?
These feelings did not last though. We always carry part of our past in our memories and subconscience. And that’s plenty – our present is where we should put our attention to.
Good luck in finding a solution that works for you. I like the suggestion of scanning and keeping the good entries and drawings, yes, it’s editing – but if you can’t edit your past, who can? Keep the good and throw away the rest.
What an interesting post!
I had kept journals, letters and some travel diaries until last year. I was actually bored reading about my travels again and how everything was “wow”(beautiful scenery, amazing food) or “not wow” (trains delayed, rude people etc) and many times cringing at my old self. I threw them all, all the letters too except those from my grandparents – they wrote beautiful letters to me that I will always cherish. The letters from my friends and my sister were also showing their age and I showed no hesitation in throwing them away as well. It was interesting to read how self obsessed we all were in our late teens/early twenties.
Thanks, everyone, for your reflections. So interesting! For those who suggested scanning, I considered that, but every page of every journal? That seemed a gargantuan task that left me feeling once again, immobilized.
In the end, it becomes existential. I’m more interested in who I am today and in what is unfolding, than in who I was and my history.
Hi Louisa, Great post, and I feel your pain! I went through a lifetime’s worth of my writer’s notebooks that I’d kept since I was a child, and typed them all up before recycling them. It took about a year. And in some ways was a fools errand – now all I’m left with is huge amounts of bad writing, without the joy of looking at my crazy handwriting and doodles. I still write in notebooks, but not as much these days – but when I’ve finished with them I scan them. I know you said you weren’t so keen on that approach, but if you decide to try then I heartily recommend buying a Scansnap document scanner. It has a document feeder, scans both sides at the same time, and automatically corrects any skewed or upside down pages etc. It would turn the near impossible task of scanning them all page by page into something you could do one rainy afternoon. That way you could throw away all the physical ones you were ready to part with, but still have the option of looking at them one day, just in case. Hope that helps!
Agreed! It’s delicious freedom not to be tethered to monuments of my personal history. It’s already a part of me: I don’t necessarily want to be lugging around physical vestiges of what was significant to me when I was fourteen for the rest of my life. And as someone who has given away her share of “inherited” family furniture, china, artwork, jewelry, and more, I’ve frequently wondered if it’s not just the burden of downsizing/minimizing that’s being passed from one generation to another…some stuff has to get shared/donated/jettisoned along the way, lest we overwhelm our descendants with it. :-)
But, but…
When I was a teen we found my grandmother’s journal. It was AMAZING. I absolutely loved reading about her daily life and realizing that she had similar concerns as I. I can’t imagine throwing away a journal (I think it’s on par with deliberately damaging a book; you just don’t DO that).
I think my solution probably would have been digitizing. Spending some time to scan the pages and then care for the information digitally. That way it isn’t lost forever. Granted, that way is harder to pass on to children (c’mon, how likely is it that the archive isn’t going to fail in 60 years? You’d be taking a huge gamble). If you absolutely must discard the physical version, that’s probably my recommended method.
The idea of discarding a journal…it just seems so sad. You may not need the journal anymore, but your prosperity then misses out on learning so much.
I may be a bit harsh, though. Obviously the choice is yours to make, and the choice you make is the right choice for you if it makes you happy. The choices that make me happy and the choices that make you happy are obviously not going to be the same.
You’re assuming your “prosperity” wants to read your journals.
I know that seems harsh, but it seems parents feel a need to pass on something to their children, whether it be their old toys, broken heirlooms, or hard-to-read journals. How many of us have kept our family trinkets, not because we cherish them, but because we feel guilty if we discard them? Do your descendants really need to know who you had a crush on in 7th grade, who bullied you in gym class? Honestly, I do not feel that would bring value to your legacy’s life.
Some might say “What if my future grandkids want to read my diaries?” But what if they don’t? What if you don’t have grandchildren at all? The what if question is what drives many of us to keep superfluous items, for the just in case scenarios that never happen. But as minimalists we need to evaluate how these items fit in our lives, realistically and sometimes unsentimental. Journals are no different.
I agree about scanning the journals and putting the files into Evernote or a similar searchable program. You could also photograph them and then upload them into private flickr albums so they’d be easy to look at page by page if you ever wanted to. Lots of work but perhaps worth it (maybe do one per weekend). Once everything was digitized, you could make the purging of the physical journals into a sort of celebration! I don’t know if you’re a definite pen/paper journal writer or if you could start journaling on the computer to keep things streamlined in the future (?). Good luck with whatever you decide (it’s tough stuff)!
As I’ve read the comments I’ve vacillated back and forth between “keep them,” “scan them,” and “toss them.” Everyone makes a compelling argument and they each resonate a certain way in me. I don’t want the trivial exploits of my youth to be remembered by my “posterity,” but on the other hand, my husband and I love to pull out a journal at random and read it a few entries at a time before going to bed. We love reminiscing about events, vacations, etc. and go to them for the details we can’t seem to remember as clearly (i.e. argue about:)). I only average one per year (perhaps about 15 by now), but between now and the time I’m 80 (as an arbitrary number), I’ll have amassed 50 more books. I suppose if that’s the extent of my “clutter” it’s the least of my worries. However… this post has changed my ideas about what I write about. I write a lot about dreams of “what if” and going back and reading those is monotonous and boring. I have been working on being more intentional in my life, but hadn’t translated that into my journalling. Perhaps set aside a night per week to write down any events as of late and keep it brief. That’ll slow the accumulation.
Another idea I’ve heard is only journalling once per year. Do “A Week in the Life of the ________ Family.” Record the mundane events and all that stuff. You’ll always remember the big events, but will forget the day-to-day stuff, so this is a way to record life as it really is without the piles and piles of journals.
I’m glad I’m not the only person who feels better culling my herd of old journals. Most people are horrified.
I have years of stream-of-conscious journals; the noise-to-content ratio is wretched. 90% completely inane blather, 5% things I’d be horrified if anyone ever read, 5% things that are actually worthwhile.
As others have said, the value for me was in the process. I journaled more in difficult times than good times, more when my thoughts were rushing around in circles as a way to calm them (thus, a lot of very repetition, not only between entries, but even within the same entry), and I always figured it better to deal with a whiney mood by writing about it than subjecting anyone else to it.
Thus, the journals are boring, slanted to the negative, and the stream-of-conscious means that there are passing thoughts that really shouldn’t be preserved for posterity.
I’ve been re-reading and thinning them. Sometimes copying (often in clearer wording) entries (These bits, it’s clear that it’s a transcription and not the original), sometimes cutting and pasting bits of pages, in a few cases saving the entire journal unaltered.
I’m looking into shredding services, because I’m generating far too much paper to shred myself. (And I definitely want the discarded pages shredded, not just thrown in recycling.)
The huge volumes of journals I’ve been carrying around feel like baggage, not treasures. The much-reduced scrap-books-of-my-old-journals, on the other hand, feel like something worth keeping.
(And no, I’m not just keeping the things that present me in a positive light. I have annotations scattered throughout “[2010 Note: yeah, I was an idiot back then. But I really did think that in 1997]”)
(I’m up to July of 2001. I’m going to leave the journal that spans August, September, and the beginning of October 2001 unaltered, and jump ahead to the journal I stared later in October to continue the thinning.)
All in all, the volume of what I’ve kept is about 5% of the volume that I’ve shredded (or set aside for shredding). It’s gone from feeling like (physical and emotional) baggage that I’m lugging around to a worthwhile record of my life and the changes I’ve been through.
I kept a journal until I was 19. Then my mother found the last one, read it and… well, I still have not forgiven. Sad, I know. Still, I still write, hide and then destroy. It helps me a lot to see my problems and feelings on the page before me, it helps me to think clearer, decide what I really want and make a plan of how to improve things. In a way it is healing. I would like to keep something very much, however, I still can not get over that day when my journal was found. Whatever you do, girls, whether you keep your journals or not, be gentle, be very gentle and understanding with what you find, if you do so.
Writing is an important part of my life, I still jot things down… and then I burn and shred. But you know – if I could get over what happened then, I would have kept all my journals, digitalized or otherwise. They are a part of me, as I was and as I am.
Awesome, Kurkela!
Like many here, journal retention has confounded my minimalist campaign. Diaries have served various purposes for me, from recording inane trivia and remembering wise sayings to (more recently) documenting the case for leaving an abusive relationship. Whenever I doubted my decision to go, those pages reminded me how bad my life really was. They convinced me to never go back.
With the trauma in the past, however, that diary has served its purpose and I’m ready to be rid of it. It’ll probably see flames in the next few months. As for the others (which go back to age 9), I started scanning them several weeks ago and saving them into PDFs. I recommend using a camera/tripod instead of a traditional scanner. It’s so much faster and retains quality just as well.
As for posterity, I’ve decided not to leave my diaries to anyone. I’ll destroy them all before I die. In my experience, it may take a hundred pages of diarizing to distill one useful truth. I’d rather write an essay/letter for my children than have them relive my stubbornness. The point of parenting is to raise adults who won’t make the same mistakes as you did. So why make them read through the whole drama? Instead, give them the meat and throw away the bones.
The same goes for historical posterity: Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish wildly successful childhood diaries, she wrote memoirs. If you wish to transmit the makeup of your everyday life, write it like a story and pass it along. It’s far easier to say: “I had eggs for breakfast every day that year” than it is to write, “I had eggs today” 365 times. If a historian reads your diary, they will (no doubt) summarize it for others. Why not save them the time and summarize for yourself?
Finally, I’ll reiterate what others have said: minimalism is about embracing what you cherish and purging the leftovers. If your diaries add goodness, joy, peace, or positivity to your life, by all means keep them. But if they depress you, insult you, embarrass you or harm you, then be free of them!
I really enjoyed this post, and especially the comments. I’m so glad to hear that I’m not the only one completely mortified to find out how shallow and selfish I was as a pre-teen/teen. I have one angsty preteen journal, and it is NOT fun. At one point, I taped the entire thing shut, just so I wouldn’t have to go through the agony of rereading my self-centered, unoriginal thoughts. I wish I had just thrown the thing away. Why revisit these feelings when they are so painful? It’s true that our past experiences make us who we are today, but I prefer to focus on my present actions and reactions, and just try to make them better, regardless of what I may have experienced my my past.
I’ll have a much more difficult time getting rid of my old letters and calendars. I also have several journals from my college years, but I very rarely refer to them, and they are less writing, and more scrapbooks, which make them a bit more fun. Ticket stubs, photos, receipts, etc. And for several years, I kept mini-journals – just a few lines jotted in the square inch on my calendar. These are fun, because I couldn’t get into detail – it’s just a barebones account of anything that happened during that day – just the facts. :)
I think it’s important to note that journaling is an excellent way to find our voice and to improve our writing skills, so, while we don’t necessarily need to reread our journals or even keep them around, we should still do it if we are so inclined.
How timely this is. I am re-typing my grandmother’s five-year diary that she began in 1937. I offered to do this for my mother because we are having a family reunion and thought it would be nice to have a format all could enjoy. I’m so glad my grandmother didn’t throw this away! She died when my mother was only eleven years old. I am only into the first two months of the diary and have felt so connected to the grandmother I never got to know.I’m sure my mother felt the same when she first got a chance to read it in in her 40’s (a family member had kept it hidden thinking my mother was too “young” to understand everything in the diary). I’m not sure about the debate about throwing something so precious away for sake of space. I think I’ll retype my journals and discard the old. At least my family will have a timeline of those important things in my life. Cheers!
My mom has kept a journal since my younger sister was born in 1967, so we are hitting 45 years this summer! My mom is now 77 years old and still writes down pretty much each day what happened, where she went, or what went on in our family or with her friends. We have had family discussions about things that we cannot agree on, and her journaling comes in handy. For instance, if I wonder at what age I got permission to get my ears pierced, she can look up the info (amazingly quick). I’m not really sure what will happen to all of these journals once she’s gone. Maybe my sister or brother will want them! I agree that reading through them would generate some valuable, interesting, or humorous information, but that is interspersed with a lot of daily life (I washed clothes, ironed, etc.). I am a scrapbooker, so maybe I could use some select passages to make a few scrapbook pages about my mom and her life.
I am in the process of scanning old journals into Evernote and the results have been great.
Every couple of days, I love to look back at what I was doing 1 year ago, 5 years ago, 10, 15, 20, 25, etc. It gives me a sense of perspective and lets me appreciate the ways in which I’ve developed (and, in many cases, the ways in which I am fulfilling some of my childhood dreams).
Having things in electronic format makes it so much easier to do this retrospective review.
I don’t care if posterity gets to read my journals or not; as long as I can access them, I’m happy. But Evernote Corporation is serious about wanting to stay in business for at least 100 years, so maybe posterity will get its chance.
I got rid of all my journals when I was in my early 20’s, not out of minimalist intent, but because I was embarrassed by some of the contents. However, within only a few years I really regretted it; there were things I wrote when I was first dating my husband that, though expressed in an immature manner, were precious, and I wish I had them for my children to read. My oldest daughter is now an adult and a mother, and she has chosen to set up a private blog as her journal, so that her children can someday read a digital copy of her thoughts, and no one has to store the books.
I came across a love letter I had written to my boyfriend (now husband) this weekend. The writing was so embarrassingly weird. I showed it to him, asked what he’d seen in me, and got rid of it quickly.
i have no end of grief at having burnt my lifetime collection of letters from grandparents, mum, dad and friends. I was trying to understand non attachment, I thought it meant to throw away/ let go of the past …. but i now realise that it did nothing to reduce attachment … and worse still I can never get back those wonderful glimpses and connections to the life and stories of my friends, grandparents and parents ….
i find it hard to believe that i let myself do this…. as does my husband … I really wish that i could take that moment back.
This post really relates to me. I have kept diaries on and off since my teenage years, the first one being the small lock and key type one that was a Christmas present. It wasn’t until I started experiencing problems in my second marriage that a friend of mine gave me the idea of keeping an actual journal and I have kept one for years, but not without worries. I destroyed ten years worth of journals a few years ago, mainly because I was worried about them being read, even though I lived on my own then and still do now but there is always that ‘what if’ element. Then I started journaling again and the pretty books piled up yet again. I live in a one bedroomed flat, I did start to think of this as possible clutter and again the worry of them being read started to get to me again. Since my dear Mum died six years ago I have got closer to my brother and his wife, whereas before relations between us were strained and I had written some things in my journals that weren’t very complimentary about them and that I wouldn’t ever want to them read, especially now we are very close. I agonised over this for ages but then decided to get them scanned and I threw out the hard copies. Prior to throwing them out I did read through them and like many people here have said, I found themn depressing, embarrassing in parts and long winded to read back, all those reams of continuous writing and complaining. So they are gone and in a way I do miss the physical copies and I miss writing in my journal. I very rarely go back and looked at the scanned copies but at least I know they are there. I have kept appointment diaries going back to the 1990s because these just give details of events, I now keep my appointments on my phone so these don’t build up. I do however now keep a visual diary, an idea inspired by my friend who also used to keep a journal but her husband read it and it caused trouble for her so now we both keep a visual diary which is more like a scrapbook. I find this very interesting to do and to read back which I do often. I keep it in a an exercise book, the current one has been on the go for nearly a year now so I don’t see them mounting up very quickly and they are easier to store than the hard backed journals were. I write down a summary of events and paste in photos and tickets etc. Its totally non private and I leave it on my coffee table, I have even shown it to friends and family. But I do get tempted by pretty journals and I do miss the free flowing writing and getting things off my chest. I have tried to do this on the computer but its not the same. I do write in a spira bound shorthand notepad to offload and then rip out the pages afterwards if I feel they are too personal and destroy them but somehow its not the same knowing that I will almost immediately destroy it. Does anyone have any ideas on how to get round this? I look at pretty journals, get tempted and then walk past them and tell myself I don’t want to start that up again and have the same old worries. I have just been to my cousin’s funeral today which has made me think even more. He has gone now and his brother and sister are left to deal with his house, his sister (my cousin) was saying how she found a photo album when she was sorting out his stuff. She was very close to him and never used to get on with her other brother, but now they are close and the only siblings left. It made me think how precious life and family are and now fragile it could be leaving behind a journal of angst for someone to come across rather than just a photo album. No, I can’t go back to all that again but I still need to release my feelings. Any comments would be welcome.
I threw out my high school journals last year, nearly all of the cards & letters I’ve ever received and almost all of my photos (still have a lot of digital ones from the last 5 years ago). I’ve also removed nearly everything from my past life, except for some of my artwork (most of it, except some of my sketchbooks, is on display in my house).
I was brought up to archive my life and remember everything. My life had been pretty tough. Abusive childhood followed by a long term unhappy relationship.
Getting rid of reminders of my past has been so freeing. I prefer to live in the present with my husband and my cats. I revel in leaving my past behind. The present is what matters to me. The past is the past. I’m happy to forget past events; even the happy events. Nostalgia is quite stifling, I’ve found.
I read the Monday entries and look at the things we have in common. I now save some magazine articles where I used to save stacks of magazines. None of the people I’ve met over the years except on minimalist sites are interested in less, only more. Many of my friends live alone in large houses approx. 3000 sq. ft. I am still finding things to give away. Glad young people are interested in making a smaller footprint.
I see pages like the one shown sold as works of art. We are still giving away at least one big bag full of stuff every week. The homes in most decorating magazines seem too full of things.
I went through 5 boxes of my Mom’s papers. I threw out or shredded most of them. My brothers and I started with over 80 boxes of papers. Some are going to two different museums. My mother broke a lot of stuff and her clothes were ruined, but her papers were her treasures.
I was shredding old bills and papers ( at least 5 years old) and my DH asked me why it bothered me to keep them. I had gotten rid of old towels, sheets and blankets another day. I said I just could not stand clutter. My condo is full of plants, but I am giving away 60 next time I teach a class.