One thing I struggle with: My (many MANY) old journals are difficult to search, because I never transcribed them digitally. Sometimes I know I've written something about something, and then I lose an entire day to trying to find it.
Nov 3, 2023Liked by Sari Botton, Memoir Land, Anne Liu Kellor
Do you think you'll ever type them? In late 2017 I searched some old journals to answer a simple factual question. That cumbersome search, plus the interestingness of the journal entries I read, led me to type up all of my journals into Google docs. From age ten until 2017, I'd written 974,000 words in my journals! I kept journaling and I continue typing. It's a blast to be able to search them, and I wouldn't have been able to write the memoir I'm working on without having typed the journals and created a detailed life timeline. Also I enjoy typing my journals. I'm proud of them, and they are a body of work.
Likewise. I think if I had more time, I'd mine those old journals all the more. Now that I'm much more busy than I was when I was younger, I mostly try to do better at archiving/making notes about what's in the new ones as I go, and trust/hope/suspect that someday I'll go back again to the older ones and see myself in a new light, or find new scraps to play with.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it could be easier to scan journals instead of transcribing them. There’s services that you can pay to scan your family photos, I bet they would do journals, too. And these days PDFs and other kinds of files are searchable!
Thanks! I took photos of the front and back of each notebook and of any doodles inside, and inserted the images into the Google docs. Occasionally I photographed a handwritten passage. Still, I can't throw away the originals.
Sari--but isn't that part of the beauty of keeping them (more than 65 of them and always handwritten)? There's something about losing that day and discovering material that way. I'm often surprised by what turns up.
That's so true. It's runs contrary to the pace of life so many of us keep, or are expected to keep, to 'lose a day' to nostalgia or sifting through old things. But it can feel akin to a spiritual experience to let ourselves go there, indeed. A visit with past selves, with ghosts, with old parts of us who might return to the present with new messages to whisper for us to hear anew.
I have about 20 commonplace notebooks as well with favorite quotes and writing that moves/inspires me. I love looking for a quote and getting lost. I made my own inspiration and am using it when needed. That said, I do type of parts of journals when I'm working on something specific after I've foraged for what I need. Your essay was great.
this is why I put stuff I want to be able to find again in text messages to myself. Those are searchable, and archivable. The journals I use as a sort of therapy, and sometimes I go back and look at them and am really surprised if there's something good in them!
Every time you do a search you could type up a list of contents for that journal, which would then be searchable, and not as big a job as transcribing all the journals. For future journals, number each even page (shorter and simpler than numbering them all), and keep a list of contents at the back. Then transcribe them at the end.
As someone who just finished my own 1-week "DIY writing retreat," I found so much to resonate with here. I also have some new tips on how to mine my journals for a longer work-in-progress. Thanks for sharing this beautiful piece, Anne.
Nov 3, 2023·edited Nov 3, 2023Liked by Memoir Land, Anne Liu Kellor
When Michigan State's library bought my literary papers, that included boxes of journals which I was glad to say goodbye to. They went back decades to my college and grad school years. The only journal I keep now is a voice lessons journal where I make notes (no pun intended) about the lesson, listening to it afterwords on my tablet, and write down anything important or inspiring my teachers have said. I journal about voice because it's new to me. But me, myself? I've published a memoir and many memoir essays and that's where I ruminate.
For nearly a year, I have been transcribing my journals (beginning in 1964 as a high school sophomore) in a kind of core sample of my life. The patterns are interesting, at least to me. My plan is to destroy most of the originals when I finish the task early in 2024. I do edit out some names, and have omitted bits that could be hurtful to others. https://jopaoletti.substack.com
I found it so rewarding and enlightening to type my journals, which began in 1975 at age ten. It was as if a light had been turned on and illuminated my young life, and I understand my life so much more.
I guess because I have no kids, and am the black sheep of the family, all of whom are determined not to "dwell on the past," my journals will be thrown away or never read, and are written knowing that. Anyone reads them at their risk, as I'm a HUGE complainer! Ha ha ha. I should probably put that in the first page of every one of them. And they're probably mostly illegible. For the moment they take the place of the therapy I can't afford, I guess.
But alas, my friend/neighbor Els was the same-- black sheep, writer, no kids. Look what happened! Not to say some neighbor kid will inherit your journals, but still... you just never know what the universe has in store for us!
Ha! I am a huge complainer in my journals too- is anyone not? I think that's the shame at the pettiness, its a place to get out all our ugly thoughts, all our victimhood, all our real yet often tiresome malaise! And so true about therapy substitute! One of the best methods for sure, this narrative healing process! xo
Deeply relate to this - I’ve been keeping journals only for 3 years, writing my Morning pages diligently ✍️ but I can’t image getting rid of them yet wouldn’t want someone else to read them either. A funny writer’s dilemma. Thanks Anne for this piece!
I really loved this essay, Anne. I especially love the part about the slippery nature of truth in our journals, the "blind spots" we find when we look back, years later, at our younger selves' version of our lives.
This is true for me as well, so much so that in my memoir, I included this Author's Note:
"When I first conceived of writing this book, I consulted my old journals and was shocked to discover how often I had lied to myself. I understood, then, that I would have to do a great deal of emotional work to find a deeper truth than any I had previously written down. This book is my attempt to retrieve such truth."
Thank you so much for sharing this post. Loved everything about it! Working on my own memoir, I had to come to terms with what to do with my journals....a snippet from my writing:
To burn or not to burn? That was the question I contemplated at the start of the new year. The subject? My journals of the past twenty years. During my annual January task of organizing and purging, I found them, again. The blue storage bin containing the journals was tucked away at the top of my closet. I had moved this bin, or its smaller equivalent, seven times during the last two decades. In California, the bin moved from the bedroom I lived in at my chosen family’s home, to a rental house, to an apartment and then back to a different rental house. For two and a half years, the bin rode atop a sleeping loft in a recreational vehicle while it traveled cross county. In New Mexico, the bin moved into a rental house and then to its current location in my forever home, where it has remained for two years. Each time I moved it, I said to myself, “Lisa, one day you need to do something with these journals.”
Fabulous. I've been writing a memoir too. It was amazing to see what a vast resource the journals are, after finally being able to shed the embarrassment and read them with nonjudgment and curiosity.
I agree. Nonjudgement and curiosity are key. If it brings up shame, well, to me that points to more work I still need to do on myself-- whether via processing through writing/art or in therapy.
This was a good read. I am constantly clearing away unnecessary bins of papers which include my mother's travel logs, calendars and journals and my own journals of what I did for many years. I also noted that every February seemed to have the same ruminations and all the feelings I've felt in nice spoken words. There is a break in the timeline however because one argument caused me to destroy about a dozen notebooks! There is now a corner of the closet where these journals will stay until...
Holy mackerel. First off: I love your writing. Wow. Second: Never has anyone so completely encapsulated my personal experience as you did in this piece. I relate so incredibly much to these feelings you share. You’re right: It is a catharsis, journaling. I’ve been an aggressive journal writer since 2006, when I was 23. I’m 40 now. Like you, I have stacks and stacks of journals. Like you, I feel that mix of exhilaration and shame when I contemplate family and friends potentially reading my words after I die. I worry I’ll be hated, reviled, misunderstood. Maybe I will be. But it is my truth, or complex layered versions of my truth.
Anyway. Thank you. I also write (on Substack) very deeply personal material, a mix of autobiographical fiction and memoir. You’re right about the fickle, slippery nature of memory. What did Joan Didion say? We tell ourselves stories in order to live?
Additional comment — I loved this essay, so much. Read most published diaries I come across, and also people writing about diaries (Virginia Woolf studied other people's diary-writing approaches and decided to be rigorous with hers, whereas I see the whole point of a diary as being the place where no rigour at all is needed — the place to relax with writing.) Look very much forward to the coming book on the neighbor's diaries. And can't resist mentioning this very odd but fascinating book on reading a stranger's diaries, with lots of unexpected pieces: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/03/a-life-discarded-18-diaries-found-in-a-skip-alexander-masters-review-fourth-4th-estate-dido-davies
My husband wrote ‘morning pages’ for many years. As you know they are stream of consciousness writing, and not meant to be read by anyone else. After he died I destroyed them. I found it hard, because by reading them I would have been close to my beloved husband again. But I was aware that they were private, and by reading them I might have found the old adage was true “eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves”.
Many people in the past asked for their private papers to be destroyed. Sometimes to the detriment of understanding more about great people, but understandable.
Thanks for sharing such a fantastic post. Much of what you write resonates. I'm always struggling with my journals. Do I burn them? Perhaps that would be the easiest route. Or do I mine them? I've done so until 2020 and now have three years left to summarise, digitise and reflect on. But it's so hard that sometimes I'd rather burn them.
Thank you for reading and sharing! That takes a lot of work to digitize and summarize. Perhaps it's always a mix of doing what we can, and letting go of what we can't.
One thing I struggle with: My (many MANY) old journals are difficult to search, because I never transcribed them digitally. Sometimes I know I've written something about something, and then I lose an entire day to trying to find it.
Do you think you'll ever type them? In late 2017 I searched some old journals to answer a simple factual question. That cumbersome search, plus the interestingness of the journal entries I read, led me to type up all of my journals into Google docs. From age ten until 2017, I'd written 974,000 words in my journals! I kept journaling and I continue typing. It's a blast to be able to search them, and I wouldn't have been able to write the memoir I'm working on without having typed the journals and created a detailed life timeline. Also I enjoy typing my journals. I'm proud of them, and they are a body of work.
If I had the time, I would!
Likewise. I think if I had more time, I'd mine those old journals all the more. Now that I'm much more busy than I was when I was younger, I mostly try to do better at archiving/making notes about what's in the new ones as I go, and trust/hope/suspect that someday I'll go back again to the older ones and see myself in a new light, or find new scraps to play with.
It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it could be easier to scan journals instead of transcribing them. There’s services that you can pay to scan your family photos, I bet they would do journals, too. And these days PDFs and other kinds of files are searchable!
That's what I am working on this month.
Very impressive, well done. I love to see handwriting and doodles, so perhaps there is an in-between way.
Thanks! I took photos of the front and back of each notebook and of any doodles inside, and inserted the images into the Google docs. Occasionally I photographed a handwritten passage. Still, I can't throw away the originals.
How special to include images of your handwriting and doodles.
Sari--but isn't that part of the beauty of keeping them (more than 65 of them and always handwritten)? There's something about losing that day and discovering material that way. I'm often surprised by what turns up.
That's so true. It's runs contrary to the pace of life so many of us keep, or are expected to keep, to 'lose a day' to nostalgia or sifting through old things. But it can feel akin to a spiritual experience to let ourselves go there, indeed. A visit with past selves, with ghosts, with old parts of us who might return to the present with new messages to whisper for us to hear anew.
I have about 20 commonplace notebooks as well with favorite quotes and writing that moves/inspires me. I love looking for a quote and getting lost. I made my own inspiration and am using it when needed. That said, I do type of parts of journals when I'm working on something specific after I've foraged for what I need. Your essay was great.
this is why I put stuff I want to be able to find again in text messages to myself. Those are searchable, and archivable. The journals I use as a sort of therapy, and sometimes I go back and look at them and am really surprised if there's something good in them!
Every time you do a search you could type up a list of contents for that journal, which would then be searchable, and not as big a job as transcribing all the journals. For future journals, number each even page (shorter and simpler than numbering them all), and keep a list of contents at the back. Then transcribe them at the end.
As someone who just finished my own 1-week "DIY writing retreat," I found so much to resonate with here. I also have some new tips on how to mine my journals for a longer work-in-progress. Thanks for sharing this beautiful piece, Anne.
Thank you, Ashley!
When Michigan State's library bought my literary papers, that included boxes of journals which I was glad to say goodbye to. They went back decades to my college and grad school years. The only journal I keep now is a voice lessons journal where I make notes (no pun intended) about the lesson, listening to it afterwords on my tablet, and write down anything important or inspiring my teachers have said. I journal about voice because it's new to me. But me, myself? I've published a memoir and many memoir essays and that's where I ruminate.
For nearly a year, I have been transcribing my journals (beginning in 1964 as a high school sophomore) in a kind of core sample of my life. The patterns are interesting, at least to me. My plan is to destroy most of the originals when I finish the task early in 2024. I do edit out some names, and have omitted bits that could be hurtful to others. https://jopaoletti.substack.com
I found it so rewarding and enlightening to type my journals, which began in 1975 at age ten. It was as if a light had been turned on and illuminated my young life, and I understand my life so much more.
I need to do this!
Great post. And yes, journals make my life writing memoir so much easier. Not easy, but easiER.
BTW, a recent Substack post was about the 5 journals that became my new memoir. There's also a link to a video I made. https://open.substack.com/pub/honeymoonatsea/p/a-gift-from-you-to-me-for-free?r=3fwf9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Amazing. Thanks for the link!
I guess because I have no kids, and am the black sheep of the family, all of whom are determined not to "dwell on the past," my journals will be thrown away or never read, and are written knowing that. Anyone reads them at their risk, as I'm a HUGE complainer! Ha ha ha. I should probably put that in the first page of every one of them. And they're probably mostly illegible. For the moment they take the place of the therapy I can't afford, I guess.
But alas, my friend/neighbor Els was the same-- black sheep, writer, no kids. Look what happened! Not to say some neighbor kid will inherit your journals, but still... you just never know what the universe has in store for us!
Ha! I am a huge complainer in my journals too- is anyone not? I think that's the shame at the pettiness, its a place to get out all our ugly thoughts, all our victimhood, all our real yet often tiresome malaise! And so true about therapy substitute! One of the best methods for sure, this narrative healing process! xo
This Giant Chest Full Of Journals inspired me to write a post about my shelfload of notebooks, and how I went from embarrassed by my young writings to curious and excited about them. Thanks! https://open.substack.com/pub/franmason/p/whats-in-the-notebooks?r=6ptf5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
That was really lovely, especially the bit about your journals being both witness and therapist. Thanks for sharing the link.
Thank you!
Deeply relate to this - I’ve been keeping journals only for 3 years, writing my Morning pages diligently ✍️ but I can’t image getting rid of them yet wouldn’t want someone else to read them either. A funny writer’s dilemma. Thanks Anne for this piece!
Thanks! That's where it all began for me too decades ago-- with Morning Pages and with Natalie Goldberg's books and prompts!
👍👍
I really loved this essay, Anne. I especially love the part about the slippery nature of truth in our journals, the "blind spots" we find when we look back, years later, at our younger selves' version of our lives.
This is true for me as well, so much so that in my memoir, I included this Author's Note:
"When I first conceived of writing this book, I consulted my old journals and was shocked to discover how often I had lied to myself. I understood, then, that I would have to do a great deal of emotional work to find a deeper truth than any I had previously written down. This book is my attempt to retrieve such truth."
Thank you for witnessing that part, one of my favorite parts too. xo
Yes 🙌
Thank you so much for sharing this post. Loved everything about it! Working on my own memoir, I had to come to terms with what to do with my journals....a snippet from my writing:
To burn or not to burn? That was the question I contemplated at the start of the new year. The subject? My journals of the past twenty years. During my annual January task of organizing and purging, I found them, again. The blue storage bin containing the journals was tucked away at the top of my closet. I had moved this bin, or its smaller equivalent, seven times during the last two decades. In California, the bin moved from the bedroom I lived in at my chosen family’s home, to a rental house, to an apartment and then back to a different rental house. For two and a half years, the bin rode atop a sleeping loft in a recreational vehicle while it traveled cross county. In New Mexico, the bin moved into a rental house and then to its current location in my forever home, where it has remained for two years. Each time I moved it, I said to myself, “Lisa, one day you need to do something with these journals.”
What do you see as your possible options, besides burn them or keep them in their bin? I say, "type them up!" <3
Not only did I not burn them, I spent nearly 100 hours across two months re-reading them all! After that experience, I began to write my memoir 😊
Fabulous. I've been writing a memoir too. It was amazing to see what a vast resource the journals are, after finally being able to shed the embarrassment and read them with nonjudgment and curiosity.
I agree. Nonjudgement and curiosity are key. If it brings up shame, well, to me that points to more work I still need to do on myself-- whether via processing through writing/art or in therapy.
🔥🔥
This was a good read. I am constantly clearing away unnecessary bins of papers which include my mother's travel logs, calendars and journals and my own journals of what I did for many years. I also noted that every February seemed to have the same ruminations and all the feelings I've felt in nice spoken words. There is a break in the timeline however because one argument caused me to destroy about a dozen notebooks! There is now a corner of the closet where these journals will stay until...
It's always so interesting to notice your own patterns of thought/mind.... what repeats, what holds steady, who we are at core, how we change...
Holy mackerel. First off: I love your writing. Wow. Second: Never has anyone so completely encapsulated my personal experience as you did in this piece. I relate so incredibly much to these feelings you share. You’re right: It is a catharsis, journaling. I’ve been an aggressive journal writer since 2006, when I was 23. I’m 40 now. Like you, I have stacks and stacks of journals. Like you, I feel that mix of exhilaration and shame when I contemplate family and friends potentially reading my words after I die. I worry I’ll be hated, reviled, misunderstood. Maybe I will be. But it is my truth, or complex layered versions of my truth.
Anyway. Thank you. I also write (on Substack) very deeply personal material, a mix of autobiographical fiction and memoir. You’re right about the fickle, slippery nature of memory. What did Joan Didion say? We tell ourselves stories in order to live?
Michael Mohr
Sincere American Writing
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
The Incompatibility of Being Alive
https://reallife82.substack.com/
Thank you so much for sharing all this, Michael! Glad to know how much this piece resonates with folks.
Additional comment — I loved this essay, so much. Read most published diaries I come across, and also people writing about diaries (Virginia Woolf studied other people's diary-writing approaches and decided to be rigorous with hers, whereas I see the whole point of a diary as being the place where no rigour at all is needed — the place to relax with writing.) Look very much forward to the coming book on the neighbor's diaries. And can't resist mentioning this very odd but fascinating book on reading a stranger's diaries, with lots of unexpected pieces: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/03/a-life-discarded-18-diaries-found-in-a-skip-alexander-masters-review-fourth-4th-estate-dido-davies
Wonderful essay, thank you!
My husband wrote ‘morning pages’ for many years. As you know they are stream of consciousness writing, and not meant to be read by anyone else. After he died I destroyed them. I found it hard, because by reading them I would have been close to my beloved husband again. But I was aware that they were private, and by reading them I might have found the old adage was true “eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves”.
Many people in the past asked for their private papers to be destroyed. Sometimes to the detriment of understanding more about great people, but understandable.
Thanks for sharing such a fantastic post. Much of what you write resonates. I'm always struggling with my journals. Do I burn them? Perhaps that would be the easiest route. Or do I mine them? I've done so until 2020 and now have three years left to summarise, digitise and reflect on. But it's so hard that sometimes I'd rather burn them.
Thank you for reading and sharing! That takes a lot of work to digitize and summarize. Perhaps it's always a mix of doing what we can, and letting go of what we can't.