214. The Dilemma of the Journal
Image by LiliGraphie via Getty
Each journal entry is a glimpse of what you think and feel at a given time on a given day, and we often we admit things we wouldn’t say out loud.
I got my first journal when I was in the third grade—as a gift from my mother. My family was moving to Tunisia for a year, and my mom gave one to me and another to my brother so we could record our adventures in our father’s homeland. It was a lovely object: a little leather-bound notebook with a rawhide string to wrap around it and keep the contents safe.
I don’t recall what I wrote in there, but it was the start of what I consider the most important practice of my life. During my adolescent years, my journal was a place for self-discovery and experimentation. I wrote fiction and poetry. I made lists of things I wanted to accomplish some day—some realistic, sometimes less so. (An item from one such list: Cut arm and leg and eye holes in my double bass case to make it into a suit.) There were entries that were “aspirational” (i.e., straight up lies), and more than a couple of stories inspired by Isabelle Eberhardt, the Swiss woman who traveled across North Africa disguised as a young Arab man, then penned stories about colonial officers in seedy brothels.
I took my journal everywhere I went, which wasn’t a problem until one afternoon in middle school. When I went into my ballet class, I left my bag with my journal in it in the changing room, and an older girl I really admired but also feared pulled out my journal and devoured its contents. She then proceeded to tell everyone what she’d read—something about a boy I liked and also a sordid Isabelle Eberhardt-inspired tale about a promiscuous young woman. (I wish I could say that was the last time my Isabelle Eberhardt fan fiction has been the cause of humiliation. More on that another day!) I felt so violated. What I had written was never intended for anyone’s eyes, and certainly not this mean girl’s.
Journaling is a private, vulnerable experience. I’ve come to think of the journal as a sacred container, where you show up as your most unedited self. Each journal entry is a glimpse of what you think and feel at a given time on a given day, and we often we admit things we wouldn’t say out loud. It doesn’t mean we’re filling pages with rants about our loved ones, though that’s what my dad thinks. Whenever he sees me scribbling away in a journal, he jokes, “There you go again—complaining about your poor papa!” I say, “Dad, don’t flatter yourself. It hardly ever occurs for me to write about you.”
I’ve spoken at length about the journal as a private, selective, even curated space with my mom, who is a prolific journaler. She told me she imagines me reading her journals in the years to come, and she likes the idea—she thinks of it as a way for me to feel close to her and to understand her more deeply. “But often I’m writing about hard things, or I’m writing in anger or some other intense emotion,” she said. “So what’s written in my journal should not be read as definitive fact.” This resonated deeply: so often the journal calls to me when I’m struggling. When I’m happy, I have fewer knots to untangle.
So the journal is a record of the unedited self at selective moments, when the ego is swaying between conscious and unconscious impulses—testing reality, you could say. And if that’s the case, it makes sense that people ask so often, “What should I do with my journals?”
Like the journal itself, the question of what to do with them is deeply personal—and well worth contemplating. At one end of the spectrum, there are people who write theirs with an imagined audience. At the other are those who are terrified that their journals will be stumbled upon, who go to great lengths to conceal them. Some secret them away in a safety deposit box. Others have thrown them into a fire, taking comfort in the sight of the pages being curled by flame, disintegrating into ash.
Several years ago, I locked mine in a trunk, and I lost the key. Now even I can’t read them—even if I want to, even if revisiting those old experiences might help me now. Anyone got a box cutter?
