I sat up in the middle of the night last night with an urgent desire to go downstairs and rummage in the garage to find an old diary. I didn’t want to look what was inside or be reminded of what I had written, I just wanted to destroy it.
Given that one of my big regrets is burning my teenage diaries in a moody angst fuelled fire (I literally set fire to them), this makes no sense. After all I don’t actively try and create more regrets for myself.
But something has happened and I am not sure if it’s maturity, acceptance or defeat. What had caused me to wake with a start and an urgency to get to the diary was the thought of my son reading it one day especially if I was no longer here and he just happened upon it while sorting through my stuff.
There is a lot of anguish in that diary, not teenage stuff because I was well into my 20’s when I wrote in it. But some heavy, dark things that I had written when my mental health was, let’s say, a bit peaky.
I thought of my son discovering my ramblings after I had gone and having to discover a whole layer about me he had never witnessed and it didn’t make me feel very settled. It’s not that I am actively trying to hide anything from him but I wonder if he has to be aware of the thoughts that I had what is already twenty years ago. I wonder if dumping something on him like that is ever a good thing.
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The other day I heard someone talking, on an episode of This American Life, about a method of getting rid of negative thoughts. She suggested you visualise putting those thoughts in a box in your head. Then taking the box and putting it in a cupboard, locking the cupboard and throwing away the key.
It’s not thought to be psychologically healthy, Ira Glass the presenter admitted, to box up your troubles as it were and not deal with them, but maybe if we look at it differently it’s not actually not dealing with them, it’s about putting your issues behind you and, in the words of Ira Glass, being an adult, sucking it up and getting on with it.
Maybe that’s why I want to get rid of my diary. Maybe it’s time I really get rid of the stuff that happened in the past rather then letting it fester under the house where it stops me sleeping.
And so now if you will excuse me I am off to burn my diary. I’d hate it to stop my son from sleeping in the future.
Do you keep a diary? Do you read through old ones? Do you plan to keep them for your kids?
I have been thinking along the same lines. Well done to you for doing something about it!
I’ve left a box of love letters and postcards and old stories I wrote in the garage … fortunately no diaries. Though I do wonder what my kids will think of my blog in a few years though – there’s some pretty dark stuff in it at times.
I have daily journals from the last 12 or so months. In time I hope to use them as a foundation for a book but when I hopefully get my day to day continuity of my memory back then I won’t write in them as much and once the book is done as long as I have daily memory continuity. Until then I am stuck with them.
I have a couple of old love letters from my fiance who died and things like that. I don’t think I will ever destroy those.