Have you ever gone back and read through your journals?
Over the years I’ve heard different suggestions on what one should do with them:
Keep them. You can go back and review the goings-on of life during that particular period. Especially relevant for those waiting to one day write a book.
Burn them. Any thought put on paper is officially materialized and part of your reality.
Stop journaling. Record everything on your computer so you can easily search names, have everything in one place, and save a tree.
In 2021, after both my kids had moved out, I started going through my life contained in containers and boxes. I came across a few journals from my senior year of high school. One was specifically designed for seniors and full of prompts. Favorite song. Best friend. Most memorable moment. You get the idea.
Also with the journal were mix tapes made for me by an ex I’d lived with shortly after senior year ended. One night I came back to our place and found him and his best friend reading through said journal. My ex started making fun of me for some of my song choices. His best friend, I think feeling bad after watching how betrayed and embarrassed I was, offered that “this Jewel lady isn’t that bad.”
I don’t believe I ever journaled that account.
Standing there with this memorabilia in my hands, some memories coming to the surface, I felt nothing. It was as if it had happened to someone else. I took the high school journals, the mix tapes, and a few other things taking up space and put them in the trash.
Several weeks ago I was working on a practice I wanted to take a client through and found myself paging through old journals looking for notes I’d taken on it. The feeling of neutrality was not the first thing I experienced, or frankly the last, as I thumbed through my legacy of thinking.
Oh my god. This is embarrassing. Was this really what was consuming you? If anyone saw this. I totally forgot about that. Probably blocked it.
Once the flood settled, I noticed something. Over the course of ten years, my thinking and patterns were all the same. Only the names of the people changed. It would be no different than looking at weather patterns and being able to predict, with 99.9999% accuracy, exactly what I was going to say and do next.
I would let the guy come back.
I would not save the money.
I would not follow through with the goals I set.
Later that evening, over dinner, I asked my boyfriend what he does with his journals once they’re full.
I save them, he said.
Huh. I’m thinking about burning all of mine. Well, with the exception of some entries — conversations with my mom before she passed, some stuff with the kids.
Really? Are you sure?
Honestly, it’s the same thing over and over, I told him. It’s all ice cream. Just another flavor. I don’t have to have it documented to know how I reacted to a particular event or person. It hasn’t been until the last years that my responses have actually changed. And yet, it doesn’t take much to think like she thinks.
Nadia Bolz-Weber put it better than I could, in a piece called “The Cringe of Palm Sunday”:
“The nature of regret, and the practice of morbid reflection itself, is in some way rooted in the idea that we are different now. We like to think it’s true — that given the opportunity to go back and do things differently, we would. We would, as improved, wiser people, make completely different choices. After all, we are better versions of ourselves now. And I kind of think that’s true. And I kind of don’t.”
The changes I’ve been living into these last couple of years have come as something of a surprise.
I cut my hair off in 2024 and immediately regretted it. That had never happened before. I’d always felt more like myself with it short. It was such a small thing, but I remember standing there thinking, that’s strange.
At the beginning of the year, my boyfriend and I decided to eat less meat. I was resistant at first, a little annoyed about it. Within a few weeks, something flipped. Not in a disciplined way. I just didn’t want it anymore. I can’t really explain that shift.
Earlier this week I found myself sitting in a tattoo removal office, going over pricing. I don’t regret getting them. I just wouldn’t get most of them today.
None of these feel dramatic on their own. But taken together, they feel like something underneath has been rearranging itself.
I know some of this is simply growing out of things. Twenty or thirty years of anything might leave you with I’ve had my fill. But I can’t help wondering if some of it is coming from somewhere deeper… an identity reshaping itself, getting more specific. Like she was always there, but the brain was running on repeat, filled with noise and driven by something outside of myself.
That’s what I read when I go back through my journals. Even with the judgment, there’s a disconnect. Like reading someone else’s handwriting in your own hand.
I want to burn it all and start from scratch.
Nadia's right that I can't be sure the new version would have done things differently. I actually lean toward thinking I would have done it all the same, even knowing what I know today.
But moving forward? I'm at least giving her something different to write about.
p.s. Turns out ‘that lady’ Jewel still holds up.
