~ click image to make biggerer ~
I've been writing a personal journal in one form or another for as long as I can remember, from writing in the sand while yellow jackets buzzed around me at the age of four in North Carolina to this new hard-cover Mead Cambridge Limited notebook I started here in my new home in Florida.
I believe in writing by hand as therapy, relaxation, and meditation. 98.567% of the words are boring, redundant, or complete bullshit. Some documented trauma and joy, extreme emotions, and ugly thoughts. None of them contained words I'd want anyone to see.
By the time I moved from New Jersey in September, I still had forty or fifty filled journals weighing me down. I toyed with keeping them because my ramblings are just that valuable, but those suckers weighed a ton. So I burned them all.
After recovering from the sheer exhaustion of lugging them downstairs and out into the backyard and then guarding them so that I wouldn't set the neighborhood on fire, the process felt good. The purgative felt like a line in the sand, clearly delineating the life I'd be leaving behind and my new adventure.
I don't want to save future diaries for my daughter to find (look up death cleaning.) These are uncensored: one of the few places where I don't go through all possible permutations for ramifications before disgorging what's in my brain.
From now on, on the anniversary of my birth, I will review what I've written (maybe) and then use however many I completed in the previous year as fire fodder.
Suleika Jaouad wrote about The Journal Dilemma in which she shares some more thoughts on journals and what to do with them.
The pens in the picture above are Thorton's Novice disposable fountain pens which are very nice.
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