On Keeping (and keeping) a Notebook

I’ve been keeping a journal since I was ten. I am now fifty-eight. That means I have forty-eight years’ worth of yellowing spiral notebooks with doodles on the front, black and white composition notebooks plastered in stickers, notebooks given to me by family and friends that weren’t something I’d buy for myself – a sturdy notebook with a dragon on the cover, a book with gold trimmed pages, a glossy pink notebook with paper so thin the ink bled through – but I filled them up anyway. These days it takes me longer (sometimes several years) to finish a notebook, but it’s a habit that has stayed with me. When the notebook is full, I toss it in a large plastic bin with the others. I never read what I wrote. I simply write, close the book, and store it with all the other books full of words.

Over the years that large plastic bin became full, and I had to buy another and then another. Every time I moved (which was a lot) I’d curse at the weight of these bins wondering why I insisted on hanging onto them. Sometimes I thought they might be useful if I wanted to write a memoir or maybe a short story about a girl in the 1980s who had an eating disorder, is hooked on cocaine with no idea what to do with her life. Or I imagined myself reading them in my golden years and having a good chuckle. Until recently, the only journals I’d ever read were the two I kept during my nine month walk across America when I was twenty because I was working on a novel about that experience. Other than that, I’ve occasionally cracked open one or two then quickly shut them. As soon as I opened the pages and saw my girlish handwriting, I’d feel my old selves rushing up through the pages like those spirits that flew out of the gold box holding the arc of the covenant in the Raiders of the Lost Ark. A silly comparison I know, yet that is what it felt like when I opened those old books. They were full of ghosts.

On my most recent move from Oregon back to California, I had to downsize from an old two-story house with a large attic to a small bungalow with an even smaller garage – think 1923 Model T garage. I needed to be ruthless about what I would take with me. After a huge yard sale, multiple runs to the thrift store and Craig’s List postings, I’d succeeded in whittling down my belongings to things I really loved and used. But the plastic bins of journals were still there, waiting to be hauled 800 miles south. Why was I still lugging around all these notebooks?

I called my friend Bobby because he always has a wise and funny way of looking at the world. Should I toss these in the recycling bin or burn them? Should I bury them in the woods or hurl them into a dumpster? “Keep them,” he insisted. “Then when you’re an old woman, in your 80s or 90s, you go into used bookstores (if they still exist) and slip your journals among the shelves. Imagine the delight of someone sliding your notebook out, marveling that it was written in 1978 or 1986 or 1994 and poring over some stranger’s personal triumphs and tragedies. It’d be better than a novel.” I wasn’t sure if I’d ever do that, but I liked the idea, so they came back with me to California. I managed to make room for them in the small garage but soon something else began gnawing at me. What if I were to die suddenly? What would happen to my journals? I don’t have children, but I still worried about anyone I know reading them. The truth is, I’m afraid of these journals. They are full of angst and things I’d rather not remember.  

My best friend Gwen does have children and also a bin or two of old journals in her garage and she didn’t want her children (now young adults) reading them when she was gone so she decided to read through them all. “I take them to bed and read them like a magazine. Anything I like I tear out and save in a folder. Everything else gets shredded.”

I found this idea inspiring so last summer I finally started to read my journals, one by one. The early ones were painfully fraught. In some ways I was a typical teen – I had crushes, worried incessantly about what others thought of me, and thought my parents were clueless about everything – but unlike a lot of typical teens my mother had six kids to manage and wasn’t able to really keep an eye on me. My father lived 100 miles away. I wound up slipping between the cracks. I was sexually assaulted at fifteen, my grades took a nosedive, I started drinking and smoking pot and stopped valuing myself. The journals from a few years later were even harder to read. During my senior year in high school, I moved into an apartment with Gwen (I was still seventeen). At eighteen, I moved to New York where I waited tables. It was 1984. I developed anorexia, a cocaine habit. I was painfully lost and searching for some purpose. I read through a few more journals from my early twenties. By then I’d walked across America and was going to a community college, but I was still searching, wondering why I was here, what my purpose was. At one point, I had to put down the notebook to cry. My old selves were flying around me, screeching and howling.

I sealed them up in their bins feeling shattered. But as the days went by, I slowly began to realize something. The girl who wrote those notebooks overcame a drug addiction, an eating disorder, a sense of being so lost she could barely function. She was also lucky – she survived hitchhiking, riding the NYC subways at 1:00 a.m. with wads of cash in her pockets, driving her 1960s Volkswagen bug in LA traffic while high on mushrooms. She was strong and resilient. She was me.

I went back into the garage, opened the bin, and began to read those notebooks without fear or judgement. When I was done, I tore out the pages that were worth keeping and tossed the rest in the recycling bin. It was important to revisit my past, but I don’t need to hang onto it anymore. Getting it down on the page at the time was the most important part – laying down thoughts, feeling and observations is how I process the world. I have my students journal in class, and I tell them it doesn’t matter if you use any of this in a paper or not. It doesn’t matter if you ever read it again. What matters is allowing yourself the freedom to simply express what is true for you at this moment in time.

I still have dozens of notebooks from my late 20s-40s. I look forward to reading those if I'm lucky enough to make it into my 80s and then maybe I will slide them into the bookshelves of a used bookstore, which I know in my heart will still be around.