On Keeping (a Giant Chest Full of) Journals

Anne Liu Kellor on an essayist and memoirist's need for obsessive, diaristic rumination.

Anne Liu Kellor’s chest full of journals (and her cat).

The giant chest full of old journals, archives of my lonely and angsty twenties and thirties, sits beneath the window, tucked away under a low table. The journals are not easy to access; it would require strength and intentionality to pull them out (but that’s okay with me, because I haven’t needed to look at that material for a long time). The newer stuff—from the years of my failing marriage, motherhood, and my depressed/anxious forties—fill another cabinet and shelf; these are now on my radar.  And still, even newer journals keep coming, one filled every couple months, documenting my daily thoughts and occupations. This is my practice, my ritual, my obsession. And it probably will be for the rest of my life, especially if I keep publishing memoir.

Inevitably I wonder from time to time, what will become of these journals? Do I really want my son or another person going through them and seeing my obsessive ruminating, the repetition of the same questions and fears—over and over and over? Twenty-five years ago I actually did inherit another person’s journals, those of my old neighbor, Els. Her husband, Frank, gave them to me after she died of complications from pneumonia at age 75.  As a young writer, and the former little girl who lived next door, whom Els doted over, I was interested in them—whereas Frank said he “couldn’t make much sense of them” and let me take home the whole chest. (I’d soon learn that theirs was not the happiest marriage.) As I began the process of deciphering her small, cursive handwriting packed into large spiral notebook pages, I began to see how lonely she was, and how obsessed by her personal philosophy and ideas. She read, wrote, and thought about so much, yet she was so isolated in her own private universe. She was a writer, a feminist, an activist, and a thinker in an era where it wasn’t so easy to publish one’s work online, much less find a community.

I judged her, however, for how she could sound—possessed, irrational, speaking in her own coded language about her philosophy that she was convinced would help save the world. In my defense, I was in my early twenties and had yet to realize how much most of us repeat ourselves over time. But what I did understand then was that this was an incredible honor, perhaps even a trespass, which came with a responsibility.  On one page she wrote, “I will be gone soon and what will become of these journals. No one will care about them. Someone will just throw them away…” and I trusted then that I was meant to have them. That it was a part of my path to someday write something in dialogue with her. I started that summer by writing letters to her, this dead woman whom I’d mostly only known as a child, as I housesat for Frank when he went off on his sailboat. Now, I’m still writing to Els and Frank—writing a braided memoir about how I eventually inherited their whole house, letters, slides, intimate archives of their marriage— at the same time that I’m writing about my own failed marriage that started to unravel after we moved into their cabin.

Newer journals keep coming, one filled every couple months, documenting my daily thoughts and occupations. This is my practice, my ritual, my obsession. And it probably will be for the rest of my life, especially if I keep publishing memoir.

With all that said, I still don’t want someone to read my journals, not my family or anyone close to me who might be hurt, angered, embarrassed, annoyed, or confused by what they witness in my uncensored purging. But I also can’t imagine destroying them, at least not until I’m certain I’ll never write again about the periods encapsulated within. Those journals are my source material. And while their evidence of patterns of neurosis, or confessions of small, petty, and judgmental thoughts may make me blush with shame, I still need them for what I can glean; I still might need to “use” them someday. Also, they feel like a part of me. Lifelong companions. Witnesses to so many phases. And I find the trajectory of my mind’s inquiry quite interesting. Others might not, and true, many phases do make me feel exasperated at my younger self. But I don’t know that I’d ever be ready to let them go before I die. Which means I have to make peace with someone eventually reading them. With exposing the true innards of my spiraling brain— and shame. Might as well start now.

They say that obsessive rumination is a trauma response. It took me a long time to realize I may have experienced a kind of trauma, or neglect, or racism, or gaslighting, or depression and anxiety, and all the other ways I can now name how my nervous system has adapted to my life. But it makes sense that I have always found journaling to be calming, therapeutic—ever since I was a young kid. I need to process my experiences through writing in order to get out of my head. Writing things down feels infinitely healthier than just thinking on a loop (usually without even being aware that you are thinking). Writing it down is a way to witness and reckon. And once I write it down, I also hold a record—a record I can later glean from for my essay and memoir writing. And so begins another cycle of reviewing old words and writing new words, on repeat, in an effort to put those words into a form that may also hold meaning for others. A desire to transform what was once muddled and overwhelming, into what now feels insightful and healing. At least that is the aim.

The chest, open, revealing Anne Liu Kellor’s many journals.

Sometimes I hear about writers who have the courage to burn their journals. I do think it’s courageous—anytime you decide to let go of something, with no looking back. No back-up file just in case. Just: this is it, the last time I will read and witness this unedited archive of this younger version of myself. Perhaps these writers first go through a process of reading them all, one by one, imprinting key memories and phrases. Or perhaps they are just ready. Or not writing memoir. Or maybe their courage comes from the fear that someone else will read and judge them someday, an awareness of mortality that grows as we age. Or maybe they truly do need to make room— both physical and spiritual room— to stop holding on to old shit. Maybe they are braver than me. Regardless, it’s not something I would consider right now.

As a memoirist, reading old journals is the main way I track the timeline of things—Wait, what year did that happen? How many years was I sleep deprived? How long did my ex lie to me? My journals not only give me key insights into the preoccupations of my younger self (hint: earlier versions of the preoccupations of my current self), but they also inevitably give me perspective on how things really went down, as opposed to how I last told the story (which in turn becomes imprinted as the new truth because that’s how memory works). It’s humbling to write a whole chapter from memory and then go back and realize you got things wrong. And it’s important, I believe, to have a sense of how slippery truth can be. How we start to remember things as we want to. So when I go back to look at source material, I am not just hunting for facts; I’m also hunting for how I interpreted my life then. I’m tracking not just a story, but a consciousness. And as such what blind spots might I still have now—what truth will I look back on five, ten years from now and retroactively wake up to?

Inevitably I wonder from time to time, what will become of these journals? Do I really want my son or another person going through them and seeing my obsessive ruminating, the repetition of the same questions and fears—over and over and over?

Yes, I have hundreds of journals. Mostly they are filled with morning writing, or occasional insomniac pleas, faint outlines of dreams, reoccurring worries. Lists, plans, deliberations about my day or week or season to come. Assessing what I got done yesterday. Assessing how I’m feeling about my ex or child or family as of late. Documenting my periods of overwhelm—which seem to be more frequent these days, these years since divorcing just prior to the pandemic. Often, I bore myself; everything I say can feel like something I’ve said before in a slightly different way, on a different day. In my twenties, when copious freewriting from prompts like “I remember…”  was still new to me, I frequently accessed old memories for the first time via writing. But now, I’m mostly just keeping up with the present, the new memories being formed. For it is still the present that I am most interested in writing about—my relationship to the world around me; I guess I’m more of an essayist than memoirist at heart in how I’m often more drawn to exploring ideas and themes at the onset, versus story. But of course the boundaries between these genres are nebulous. And everyone likes a good story. So inevitably I do go back and shape a narrative, to locate distinct threads to weave together, or to find a clear beginning, middle, and end.

I worked on my first memoir, Heart Radical, for nearly 20 years like this on and off —eventually revising former stand-alone pieces into a seamless whole, with more of a narrative arc. Now, I’ve been working on memoir number two for nearly as long in a similar way—writing bits as I go, then seeing how to make them fit together—and inevitably the shape of the larger story keeps changing. Without getting into the details, let me just say that this book is a beast. Yet I keep coming back to it, year after year (sometimes with long hiatuses). It lives in a giant binder full of drafts in various stages, and every year or so I’ll take a deep dive to see what I’ve amassed again and rework the outline anew.

I also have a ritual of going on a one-week retreat once or twice a year, and bringing the binder along with select journals to review, including all of the ones of late. I spend the first day or two sinking in—reading, skimming, dogearing pages and highlighting phrases in the journals, then typing up key lines or notes referring to longer passages that I might want to use in the book. In this way, each year the recent present becomes archived into the past. Not only because I’m still living and writing into my ending, but also because even if I’m not actively working on the book, I’m still journaling about themes related to the book and keeping my thread of connection to it alive. More and more, the busier I get in life, this is how longer works get written: in fragments that I later stitch together. Yes, this process takes a lot of patience. But it’s how I’ve learned to keep going. And it’s also how I’ve learned to dig deeper into all the ways I may try to deceive myself.

For example, I might be tempted to tell the story of my marriage as if I was blindsided. When in truth, I saw what was happening—I noticed red flags, called out small dissatisfactions, made calculated decisions to table a conversation, to back burner it, or watch it warily from the side. Because I’m always watching, noticing, and discerning. I’m also always holding off on making a firm call about something until finally, eventually, some line gets crossed, some decision made, some definitive shift—and then I can go back and shake my head and say, I should’ve known. Only I didn’t. Because while maybe you can notice the clues along the way (often in your peripheral vision: images, metaphors, sinking feelings, events that keep repeating themselves), you can’t see them yet as plot points. The narrative arc has not yet been determined, because the ending has not been confirmed. Only then can you go back and shape the story to also conform—to say, see, here’s where it was headed all along.

Of course, I wish it didn’t take me so long to write each book. No one said artists are the most rational people. But I am driven to finish my projects, because in order to try to publish them, I need to trust deeply that if they hold hard-won wisdom for me, they will also be impactful or dare I say transformative for someone else. I need to trust that this obsessive artistic path I’ve followed is still my calling, a natural process I reach for, a path that chose me. This is not selfish “navel-gazing” (a term so often lobbed at memoirists and women writing about intimate subjects like the body, family, relationships, patriarchy, and trauma); this is a desire to connect and commune with a larger community of bodies. This is necessary work. Healing work. For yes, so many of us carry trauma passed down through so many generations. And yes, for so many of us the original impulse to read and write came from the desire to soothe our wounds. And while catharsis alone does not equal art, so much great art does come from a process that required us to work through a great deal of shit in order to emerge with more insight. And then to learn how to edit and encapsulate it all in a translatable form.

Those journals are my source material. And while their evidence of patterns of neurosis, or confessions of small, petty, and judgmental thoughts may make me blush with shame, I still need them for what I can glean; I still might need to “use” them someday. Also, they feel like a part of me. Lifelong companions. Witnesses to so many phases.

Obsessively ruminating about something just in our head is unhealthy. But when we write it down, we take it out of this loop—at least for a bit. (Never mind if we return to the same topic later; after all, as writers we all have our core obsessions that in turn become our expertise, our gifts). And if we follow this path long enough to eventually share our work with the greater world, this process can feel even more redemptive. Finding an audience, however small, we are witnessed. We can exhale more easily when we no longer feel like so much of us is hiding behind silence. We might start to connect with a community of readers and fellow artists. We might even feel like we are giving back to the world. No longer hoarding all of our hard-won insights, but offering them up—and praying they land somewhere useful.

Whether you can see your life following a familiar linear “Hero’s Journey” storytelling path (full of core wounds, inciting incidents that set you off on some quest, dark nights of the soul, helpers, adversaries, and breakthroughs along the way that lead you to new depths of courage), or whether your life follows more of a discursive patterning of waves, spirals, images, and echoing repetition, we all have so much to learn through narrative and meaning making. Sometimes we just might need to experience and then write the same thing down over and over until we finally start to get it. Oh, hi. You again. Here are the words you needed to access. Here is the truth, newly voiced. Here are the silences that were blocking your way. Here is the flow again. Be your own witness.