Letters to the Editor
AKA Smith
Published Letters: 4545 Editor's Choice: 83
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In Defense of Keeping Old Journals
[Read the article: My husband read my journal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Lots of people mention hitting the delete button after they have vented or burning old papers. While I can understand these feelings there is much to be said for retaining past journals.
It is human nature to see things as story. Yet one of our most important sources of understanding -- the story of our own lives -- defies our efforts to impose meaning. We struggle with finding out who we are, then we struggle with finding out where we fit in the world, and then we struggle with finding out how to make a better exit.
Sure we are all embarrassed about what we felt in the past and how we may have expressed ourselves in writing. I too have burned journals and letters and old wedding photos. However, while we boldly declare our right to burn or delete our pasts in the interests of privacy or reinventing ourselves we may miss something important. Understanding ourselves.
Reading my writing of the past allows me to see myself anew and to try to gain some meaning from my life. Sure it is artificial to try to impose narrative on something as messy as life as it was and is lived, but I never peek inside the past but what I don't gain new understanding both of myself and others.
(There is journal software you can buy that hides any visual evidence that you keep a journal until you key in the journal-specific password. If I were married I would further embed the journal in my recipe file under "Recipes that Help Prevent PMS Symptoms." Few husbands are going to look there. To those who are married to tech experts, I suggest being equally imaginative about where to hide your hard copy.)
It is not that everyone that seeks to keep their journaling private is hiding wicked secrets. It is just that sometimes we need to find a way to know ourselves and talk to ourselves. It may sound rather strange, but women cannot always truly be women with men looking over their shoulders.
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David, I really do . . .
[Read the article: My husband read my journal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . but I also burned a great many and now sometimes wish I had them back. I destroyed some from a painful time and now wish to look at that time again because now I am better able to bear it.
Not to get too personal here, but I have also kept a long running dream diary that fills several of those slim decorated books with pretty covers. It is there that I can still sometimes get a shock. It seems that in our dreams (whether or not they are reconstructions of random synaptic nonsense) sometimes do tell our future -- only not in ways that we might expect.
Also, I intend to do a better job of journal-keeping now than in the past. My mother is suffering from dementia. It could all slip away eventually for her. She writes in detail what she did each day. Sometimes she reads from her diary to me and it is quite boring, but it helps her remember. Besides, I know some of her old secrets that she now keeps even from herself.
I am constantly fascinated by memory and how different people who were present at the same event will tell a different story. Essentially, we create ourselves, don't we? And others create us. And then we negotiate between those visions. Now, I am more aware that someday it could all slip away for me as well. I don't want to end up only defined by others.
I hope the LW will not end up ashamed of her thoughts because they became suddenly, coldly revealed. I sense that it is also difficult for her dealing with her father-in-law's illness and her husband's current necessarily divided attention. So they will negotiate now . . .
I am quite interested in the outcome for her. Perhaps she will kindly give us an update someday when she has a chance to catch her breath and see herself not only as her husband's wife, a new-wed woman with expectations, but just herself, a writer who has a right to characterize her journey.
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Rowyna, I am now truly horrified . . .
[Read the article: Kiddie prisons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . . that the Australian system allows this. Those poor children!
It seems that people everywhere must keep an eye on their governments to make certain that power is not abused. May I ask how such a system is justified?
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I find it a sort of miracle
[Read the article: George Tenet, spook for all seasons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I listened to him promoting his book on NPR yesterday and today on The News Hour.
Here is a man with a spine-ectomy and a tin ear, who was involved in policy and keeps trying to emphasize that he was not and therefore cannot even tell the truth to himself, who is promoting a book that no sane person will buy.
Is his publisher crazy? Neither the right nor the left nor the middle like this guy anymore. Is there really an audience for his self-serving view of things?
I am now convinced that the only thing one sees to become an "author" in America is a keyboard and time served in the most failed administration of my recollection.