Recommendation: Burn Your Journals
I started a fire because I was sick of myself. I was discouraged and exhausted, wallowing in a humiliation that was entirely self-imposed and perhaps even imaginary. I won’t get into the details here, because the problem was that I got into the details ad nauseum in my thoughts and in my journals. I replayed and repeated them, I chewed over them endlessly, but never managed to move forward.
All through high school, I kept the sort of journals you’d expect of a bookish teenage punk who idolized the Beats and spent her weekends kissing shirtless boys at hardcore shows. You know how the song goes: lots of wondering what it meant when he said X or did Y; lots of romantic musing about skin and sweat and clove cigarettes and the way the bass vibrates in your chest when you’re right up close to the stage. Those journals were somehow both earnest and performative, but I was performing only for myself, trying selves on, to see what fit.
One day when I had a friend over, I walked into my bedroom (maybe I was coming back from the kitchen or the bathroom, I don’t know) to find her lying on my bed, reading my journal. I hadn’t thought to hide it, because it had never occurred to me that I should. My parents respected my privacy, and I naively assumed that was how the world worked.
“This is good,” she said to me. Dead calm, like she’d done nothing wrong. “I like your prose style.”
I said thank you.
That was 1990. I wouldn’t keep a journal again until 2016.
In that long interim, I didn’t stop using a writing notebook. I still needed a place to collect lines and ideas and images, a place where poems and stories and novels could begin to take shape. I can’t imagine giving up that vital tool. But I never, ever wrote about my thoughts, or what was going on in my life, or what I had done on any given day. I never put anything down in writing that could give a window into my inner life without the plausible deniability of fiction. This wasn’t a fully conscious choice, but it was a choice that I made nonetheless: for over twenty-five years, I wrote absolutely nothing that could be identified as a journal entry.
But then, in February of 2016 (according to the first page of the oldest notebook in a stack of them), I did start to keep a journal again, in addition to my ever-present writing notebook. I began to write my thoughts and fears and worries and hopes down again. I don’t recall making that choice, either, though I must have.
Like many writers, I went through a Moleskine phase with my writing notebooks, but by the time of this journal renaissance, I’d already realized that I much prefer a simple 99-cent composition book, and so that’s what I used for the journal. I wrote in it most days, sometimes multiple times a day. When I wasn’t writing in it, I kept it hidden, even though I knew no one in my household would read it. (My husband and I have a great respect for each other’s privacy on the written page, and my kids wouldn’t have been interested. But still.) When I filled it (interesting that I find myself here resisting the word “finished”), I tucked it into a lidded wooden crate on top of my office bookshelf, and immediately started a new one.
And so the composition books accumulated over the years. They sat in that box and loomed over me, the collected weight of my unfiltered thoughts. They watched over my right shoulder as I wrote, as I taught fiction workshops on Zoom, as I daydreamed or went down YouTube rabbit holes. They were there always, just behind me, a reminder of my anxieties and fears, my jealousies and disappointments.
When the pandemic started, I thought, I might die and people will read my journals—and I won’t even be able to control who reads them—and everyone will know how utterly ordinary and unremarkable I am. I thought, I should burn the evidence.
I don’t know why I was keeping them, what posterity I thought I was saving them for, because the idea of anyone in the present or the future reading them was mortifying. The idea of being seen for the petty, scared, jealous failure that I was in those pages was intolerable. The journals were mounting evidence of my mediocrity.
I took them down from the shelf and looked through them, my first time opening each one since the day I filled it and shoved it into the box. There were months of churning over a political betrayal in my leftist organizing group, urgently written at the time, that amounted to very little in hindsight. There were three entire notebooks where I alternately worried that my then-literary agent was lying to me, and told myself that I was being a paranoid artist and should trust her. (She was lying to me. I fired her, and then filled more pages with all of the angst associated with finding a new agent.)
There were many, many pages about how very tired I was, about how I should exercise more, go to bed earlier, eat less bread, bake more bread, find a way to get a break from the kids, spend more time with the kids... There were so many pages of lists and intentions and ways to dig myself out of the various holes I felt I had sunk into.
I flipped through the notebooks, hoping to find an argument for saving them, and found instead the same patterns repeated over and over, though the main players sometimes changed. Each new notebook would start the same way: New notebook! followed by a list of goals and hopes, and how things might change for the better, if only I could think it all through clearly in that journal. And then would begin the pages of complaining and fear and sadness. Each journal began with the hope and excitement of a new notebook, the longing for change, and each one petered off into venting.
The thing is...that’s absolutely fine. A journal can be a powerful tool for sorting through and understanding your thoughts, and for diffusing anxiety. It is a fantastic dumping ground for all of the ugliness you need to get out. But is it then useful to carry that ugliness around indefinitely?
I didn’t destroy the journals right away. I sat with the idea for a year. Once I took action, they would be gone, no undoing it.
By the time I was sure I was ready to let them go, it was the second pandemic summer under wildfire threat here in the Pacific Northwest, and I didn’t dare burn them, but that was the method that felt right. It had to be total obliteration or nothing. So there the journals sat, glowering at me from their box. And then, finally, October. The rains came and the ground was soaked and lush and green, and the mud bloomed up a rich, inflammable brown in the spots in the yard where my chickens had snacked the grass down to bare dirt.
This is where I would define catharsis, I suppose, if I were an essayist. The point would be to lend some sort of universal weight to what is otherwise an anecdote about myself. Some kind of justification for the navel-gazing. But I’m not an essayist; I’m a novelist. So, let’s just say that if I were a character in a novel, I would have been walking through some shit, and I would need a release. I would be in need of some grand (grandiose) act. A cleansing. An unburdening. A fucking fire.
I hauled the journals and a box of matches out to the backyard firepit.
I grabbed the first notebook and held a match to it. The bottom edge of the pages curled and blackened, and then extinguished. So I tried another match, and another, and another, and I could not get the damn thing to catch.
It’s paper, I thought. How hard can it be to burn paper?
I turned to Twitter, as one does, and somebody said, “Lighter fluid, baby,” and someone else said, “You need to crumple up the pages. There needs to be airflow.”
Of course. Fire needs air. I needed to expose the pages before I could destroy them.
I ripped every page out of that first notebook, one by one, and crumpled them up, building a massive heap of paper balls in the belly of the firepit. I squirted on probably more lighter fluid than was strictly necessary, threw on a lit match, and up it went. I tore page after page from each book, feeding them to the fire, until they were all gone.
A paper fire, once given the right conditions, burns eagerly, greedily, but it consumes itself quickly. The journals were gone in a matter of minutes. But while the fire burned, it was a glorious thing, fast and hot, the flames rising two feet high. When I’d carried the journals out to the backyard, I’d imagined setting fire to a stack of them piled up in the firepit, closed, their words hidden from view to the last. That proved impossible, but it turned out that what was necessary to actually get them to burn was way more satisfying.
I took a video of the fire and watched it many times over the following days. It thrilled me anew with each viewing: the deep orange of the flames, the crackling sound of all of those words disappearing. Mostly, it was that sound. I would replay the video and listen again to the fire.
I didn’t call it a ritual as I did it, but it doesn’t always matter what we call a thing, or what we let our conscious mind understand about it. I walked out into the yard feeling angry and burdened and sad, and I walked back into the house feeling lighter, hopeful, as if I’d shaken free from something I hadn’t even realized had been holding me. I’d been stuck fast in my own mud for years, and apparently what I’d needed to break loose was a modest bonfire, with the hamster wheel of my mind tossed onto the flames.
Since then, I have, in fact, begun a new journal. I started it the same day that I burned the others. On the first page, I did not write New journal! I did not make a list of my plans to fix all of my problems in just ten easy steps. The first entry in my new journal talks about the fire. And in that entry, I promise myself that I will burn this new journal, too, when it’s full.
This is how I’m doing it now: I keep a journal to think through my problems, to bitch, to moan, to occasionally rejoice. And when it’s full, I will light a fire, and let it all go.
Not subscribed to this letter yet? You can join in here.