About three months before we opened up shop, I spent some time going through old journals. I started out looking for the journals I liked the best so I could contact the manufacturer. I ended up on the floor, surrounded by memories, laughing and crying and generally having a great time.
Not all journals are meant to be kept. There are periods of time in my life when anger was volatile and circumstances designed to push my buttons were a daily occasion. I have a few notebooks full of anger. The catharsis for me was in the venting, in the writing down. I burned the journals, unopened, a year later.
The nine to twelve notebooks I filled up over the loss of a relationship and a violent physical act I suffered are still in a box in the attic. The relationship was not a healthy one. The attack was emotionally damaging. I have no desire to torture myself again by reading those journals. When they come down from the attic, they will get burned.
The journals I wrote in while working with Dr. Frank Bell are ones I will keep forever. They chronicle the transition from working to being…the flowering open of my hopes, dreams, and career aspirations. His counseling as a boss and mentor were priceless to me and opened up so many new ideas and possible roads, I can’t bear to part with the record of that portion of my journey.
I keep my prayer journals and the journals in which I recorded study, insights, and growth.
As more and more of my journaling makes it into electronic media, I’m not certain if my paper journals will continue to be as prolific as they have been for years. So much of my private world finds its way into my blog and the E-Zine that I write less on paper in a personal way. I still do, but my 140 page monthly quota now encompasses all I do for the company as well as personal writing. There simply isn’t enough time in the day to keep up both. The articles and blog do satisfy my need to put my thoughts into words and exercise the writing muscle, so I’m not driven to my journal quite as much as I was a year ago. However, nothing can replace pen on paper for me and I still write a minimum of five pages a day by hand.
My old journals serve as a source of inspiration for article ideas, especially since I began taking my research notes in them about six months ago. Zotero and Clipmarks are a great add-on to my research, but the seeds and kernels of ideas still appear from my pen.
How are you using your old entries? Do you burn your journals or keep them? How often do you go through them and use the words in them?
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