I threw away my journals last year. All of them. From the little girl diaries with locks and keys to the ferociously-filled marble notebooks of my college years. Mine was a many-volumed collection of angst and, in a moment of psychological cleansing and studio space-making, I decided I had been hauling around the emotional and physical baggage of those books for too long.
I nearly lost my resolve the next day when I came home to find the steps in front of my building littered with ripped out pages from the cloth-covered journals I favored in high school, the ones I filled all the way through on thick one-sided pages then flipped over and filled one-sided the other way. My stomach churned.
I’d like to think it was a bum who opened the trash can and, angry that my adolescence could not be redeemed for nickels, tore the pages from the journals and threw them on the ground before stomping away. I’d also like to think he or she did all of this without pausing to make out words from the scribbling and that none of my creepy neighbors had the foresight to pick up the pieces and invade my fifteen-year-old self by skimming a few lines.
It’s a romantic concept, garbology, to examine a culture by looking at what it throws away. Someone reading closely that night on West 104th Street would have learned an enormous amount about the relationship, over time, between a young woman and her cloth-covered books.
everydaytrash 
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 2:27 am |
wow, that is kind of my worst nightmare. i was just talking to my brother (my unofficial “estate” executor) about how when i die, i don’t want anyone to read anything i ever wrote and didn’t explicitly share with them, and that i would like it to be burned. so he said i should put all that stuff in a box marked “burn”. he also admitted he would probably cheat and read only the stuff that says “burn” because it’d be more interesting. i had to threaten to haunt him. then i realized i should just shred it now. reading this makes me want to buy a shredder ASAP.
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 3:07 am |
i was discussing this with a prolific writer friend a while ago, who threw away the journals of her adolescent self at a similiar moment in her personal timeline. i lost most of my teenage-era journals in my many moves, and during each subsequent move i get rid of a few more pages of my college journals, and now contemplate deleting the journal files on my iBook of just a couple of years ago. i have almost always thought of ANY act of writing in terms of committing ideas and impressions and events to permanence…but no longer. i always felt bad for losing those journals, and throwing others away, but now i’m thinking: maybe they are precisely for collecting angst,etc., so that it can eventually be flushed it away.
i bet your angry bum theory is right, and not just because of two disturbing options its the least disturbing. if the neighbors were creepy, i’m guessing they would have taken entire swathes of your papers with them – people like that would never be satisfied with skimming a few lines (I lean towards that kind of voyeuristic curiousity, so i know of what i speak…)
Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 4:19 am |
Wow, privacy issues inspire such great comments from friends!