It's a Burning Question

Until about two years ago, I was a devoted journal writer. In fact, from the age of 18 to 29, I wrote nearly every day. I have moved these journals with me from apartment to apartment - from Westlake Village, to Santa Barbara, to New York City, to West Los Angeles, to Brooklyn and then back to Santa Monica. The journals were a way that I released my thoughts, emotions and recorded my daily life as well as important events. Writing was my creative outlet. Now my journals collect dust and sand as they sit on the bottom of my closet.

Every once in a while, I pluck out a random journal. I admire my neat printing (a sign of the time before I could proficiently type). When I look back on my journals, I usually open one of my worn notebooks to a random page and read a few passages. Sometimes, if I am curious to see what I was doing exactly 5 years ago, I will flip back to the entry closest to the current date, but five years before. After a few pages, I admittedly, have had enough! The past version of myself annoys me on many levels. If someone was to come across my stack of notebooks and ventured to read them, I would be beside myself. Not because they document terrible things that I have done, but because they are my own evolution, and they were written for my eyes only. The movement from a self-righteous 18-year-old to a more humbled 36-year-old has required a lot of blood, sweat, tears, meetings, dumpings, firings, hirings, successes, failures, breakups, friendships and basically a whole lot of INK!

I have contemplated burning my journals. My sister has pledged to join me in this rite of passage. We discuss the buring of our journals as a ceremonious act - as a type of cleanse and purge. It would be a formal "good-bye" to our youthful scribble, tears and triumphs.

But, I have to say, there is something that holds me back from striking a match. I am not sure if it is merely Josh, who tells me not to burn them, because they are the chronicles of who I was. At times, he knows me better than I know myself, and he knows that an impulsive ceremony that involves burning evidence might be something I regret (like, minutes later). I have to give him credit. Sometimes he is right. For example, more recently, he encouraged me to keep my vinyl records even when I swore I would no longer wanted them. Sure enough, I have kicked off 2012 with new speakers and a stash of my favorite albums. Josh says he doesn't delete photos because they act as a visual time line of his past. In the same way, my scribbles are the blueprints of who I am today. (This, however, does not mean that I don't find them unbearable reading material.

I was delighted to find an article in the New York Times by Dominique Browning titled "Burning the Diaries."

Browning states: "There were plenty of people I wanted to smoke out of my life. Come to think of it, several months earlier, one of them, about whom I had written in my diaries copiously, tearfully, had recently popped unceremoniously back into my life after decades of absence, petulantly demanding to be returned to his pedestal, or at least to my bed. Perhaps a roaring fire would put to rest the Undead.

The urge to burn may have been born, long ago, of the old prayer I said on my knees every night as a child: “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” My soul lived in my diaries, and that weighed on me; by the time I was in my 40s, if I died before I woke, I wanted Someone to snatch my diaries before anyone else did.

I started keeping journals when I was 14. I was compulsive about it. I scribbled daily — and as I went through college, I filled hundreds of pages with dense, colorful ink, going right to the edge, ignoring the light threads of red margin markers, denying paragraphs their breaks, my nib flattening under the pressure of the stream of soul pouring forth. A psychiatrist once told me that I was obviously trying to psychoanalyze myself, which, professionally speaking, is considered impossible. But there certainly was — and has always been — a form of therapy in keeping journals. It is a way of self-soothing, as an adult, a way of rubbing the satin corner of your blankie against your finger when you’re anxious about separation, or too worked up to fall asleep.

As I raked up my burn pile that fateful morning, reaching for old journals secreted in hatboxes, piled in trunks, smothered at the bottom of dress bags, I riffled through the pages, reading. I was shocked that even things that had happened 20, 30 years ago felt as familiar and as raw as if they had happened yesterday. That so unnerved me that I stopped reading. I didn’t want to wade back into those depths, where a powerful riptide still churned. Worse, I was struck by the repetition of patterns over the years: the way hurt yearning in 1977 sounded like pained longing in 2007.

I wrote about the bad boyfriends, the mean girls, the lying and cheating knaves I loved. I wrote about the wrenching pain of postpartum depression, the confusion and fear of becoming a mother, when I didn’t have a clue how to do that gracefully, kindly, compassionately; I mulled over the unalloyed sadness of a dying marriage and the pure misery of mourning the passing of a hope that, before it fled, sowed the seeds of two beautiful boys. Certainly not the sort of detritus I wanted those boys to sift through if I died before I woke.

Life really is like a game of Chutes and Ladders, I thought, taking the long view while nosing around, and burning up, my life. You work hard to climb, and you get lucky, too; you’re ambling along when suddenly, wham, you roll wrong, you make a stupid move, and you’re perilously upside down the slide. You’ve got to pick yourself up and start the climb over again. It gets wearying after a while.

That’s the starkest pattern in all of our lives. It takes so long to get the hang of it, the slipping, sliding and starting over, that by the time we’re old enough to know that the climb is everything, the whole story, the destination doesn’t matter, we’re tired enough to let wisdom in, to move efficiently, thoughtfully, to finally stop and enjoy the view along the way.

Burning those diaries, I realized I didn’t want my sons to know how profoundly I had suffered from the slides down the chutes, the tumbles through the holes that gaped open in the scaffolding of my life. That would be too hard for them. I wanted them to remember me as one who clambers back. That’s the person they grew up with. A person who picks herself up and gets going again.

Back through the years, I threw journals onto the pile. I couldn’t stop. The fire became huge and hot and loud; the pages didn’t smolder but burst into lashing flame, the books buckled and popped. Embers rocketed across the hearth; ashes blew sideways and drifted into the room.

The heat became so intense I had to back off. It was thrilling, in an atavistic, cavewomanish kind of way. I wondered if I were going to regret my spontaneous combustion — when it was too late to do anything about it. Another old pattern.

I write memoirs. And I write about my life in a blog. But as I’m constantly saying to people who wonder how I can reveal so much about myself (especially as, at heart, I am a shy person), I’m not publishing my diaries. I’m not revealing so very much, when I write, that isn’t in all of us. It is kind of like the old saw about having it all. Readers never get it all. They get some of all of it. Everything I write is true. But I don’t write about everything true. I shape, I cut, I feint and dodge; I want to get to something that is uniquely mine, and at the same time ours, too.

As the journals burned, I watched in horrified fascination, as if it were some other person laying the books onto the fire, to entertain or torture me. The fire had a violent beauty. And I did think, whoa, there goes a lot of material. But I also thought, good riddance. I’ve made what I could of that material.

I’d like to tell you that it was a profoundly, mystically cleansing experience, that I laid a lot of pain and anger to rest on that funeral pyre. Oddly, I felt only a numb relief. And a certain amount of anguish that now it was time to clean up the mess I had made of my heart. I mean, my hearth.

After reading this article I thought: Numb releif? Hmmmm...Well, should I keep my diaries? I am not sure numb relief is something I want from burning my journals. From an epidural? Yes! I expect numb relief, but not from a so-called cleansing ceremony.

Now that I know I am going to have a daughter, I think I might hold onto my journals. Perhaps they will help me make sense of some of her more difficult stages. It's hard to remember how I was was at each age until I flip to an entry from the year I was 19 or 24 or 27. Then, suddenly, all too clearly, I see myself for the person I was at that time. As lost or as sad or as poor or as happy or as free as I wrote that I was in those moments, I have to remember that's where I was at that point and I had not lived past that moment to see where I would end up. And now, I am beginning to think that burning the pages of my youth might be a regrettable choice. After all, I might need to remember how I felt at certain ages. (Not now, but someday when I am even farther from the girl I was at 18, 22, 31 and 33.)

Maybe I am not far enough from those days to take delight in the postings. The honesty on those pages cannot be replicated by the person I am now. Burning those notebooks might be like burning the bridge to my youth. For now I will keep them, and perhaps make a pact with my sister. We will burn our journals when the time comes. It will be clear when that time is. Until then, together we have a nice library, chock-full of girl grit.