The glorious Rae Earl on what to do with one’s teenage detritus:
As a lifelong hypochondriac, I have had a will since I was seven. Its conditions have changed over the years (I don’t think my brother wants my Smurf collection any more), but one codicil has remained unchanged since 1989. In the event of my death from a horrific tropical disease or a burst appendix, my best friend Mort must go to my house and burn all my diaries.
This seems faintly ludicrous now. After all, they are published and there’s a TV series based on them. Millions know that I have suffered from various mental health issues, that I rabidly masturbated with pillows and I once pretended I had a cardboard cock by using a toilet roll. I’m fine with all that, though. What I have to be careful of is the feelings of others.
Oh, the feelings of others, without which we could be so free. It’s interesting! Perhaps in the future our emails will be immediately released posthumously in a sort of Speaker for the Dead-esque celebration of transparency and understanding. One hopes not. I don’t have any physical diaries, I always missed three days and couldn’t bear the blank pages or feelings of failure and chucked them out, but, well, the internet.
“What will survive of us is blogs.” –Philip Larkin, in An Arundel Tomb.
Oh GOD I think I did burn my diaries, or at least shred them. Turrible poetry.
I definitely threw out tons and tons of pages from my diaries when I was either in high school or college. Now I sort of wish I hadn’t.
I kept paper-and-pen diaries until LiveJournal came along and then I started being terrible at the paper-and-pen diaries and putting practically every thought I had on the internet. This will probably come back to haunt me when I am old. Hopefully by then I am a “no fucks given” type of old woman and it won’t matter. It is simultaneously terrible and terribly entertaining to go back and read what I wrote in the early years of it (I’ve had mine since 2001) and how much has changed. I also still have (most of) the paper ones, though those… should… maybe never see sunlight. Ever again.
I could have written the exact same comment… I still haven’t deleted LJ but I probably should… it’s a perfect time capsule from 2001-2008.
I’m actually still using mine, though super infrequently now — posting 1-3 times a month, rather than the 1-3 times a DAY of the good ol’ days. My friends list is similarly slow, but clearly not dead yet.
Even if it does go completely dead I don’t see myself deleting it. I’ve actually come to use it as a “wait, when did that happen again?” memory-trigger thing.
Ha, same. LJ was a fantastic mnemonic device — my memory of events retained so much better when I was journaling regularly about them. I’m honestly really sad that my friendslist has turned into such an abandoned desert and that I’ve stopped using LJ, since I suspect it’s making my grasp on memory more slippery as time goes on. I can’t go back and ‘relive’ things to the same extent.
(The reliving is awful if you’re going back to your sadsack 14-year-old self, of course, but wonderful if you’re rereading the good times.)
I briefly used something *like* LiveJournal in the early 2000s (probably 2001-2003), and I would love to go back and read it and see how ridiculous I was, but for the life of me I can’t remember which online journal I used. Alas, to have the opportunity to relive my silliness.
xangaaaaaaaaa
I…I made the huge mistake of going back and reading my Livejournal from high school/early college. It was the *thing* to do then so let’s say my friends and I updated more than a lot.
I had to stop myself before I died reading it all.
I kept up notebooks (which I guess were being used to slack of in HS/write reaaalllly bad screenplays) while doing the LJ thing (via DIALUP) and never really worried about anyone being into years 2000-2007 until I met up with someone via OKC and he’d somehow found it from somehow Googling me? (That and a high-school xanga). However this mostly told me a lot about this person and about how many fucks I did not give.
Have diarised steadily since 14 with a brief foray – five years – into Livejournal, which I batch-offloaded from the internet and intermittently redesign in book format. The Livejournal articles were better written but caused more trouble; privacy features my right nut! I’m still astonished at how much I managed to self-censor on paper, as though anyone cared about those first positions but me, as though the NSA was watching on paper the whole time. As though an older me would ever believe I liked him at all.
I kept diaries religiously from the age of 5 until I was 21. I had a dozen books filled with prepubescent boy-craze, family drama, formative experiences, and finally, sophomore year of college, over-analyzing a slightly abusive fuckwad ex-boyfriend.
And then, I DID burn my diaries. I really did. In a dramatic backyard bonfire, encouraged by a new boyfriend who turned my world upside down (in a good way).
It felt great. I used to read back through my old diaries all the time and they would conjure up lots of unpleasant memories, embarrassments, etc — and now it’s all gone, and I can forget things.
I still feel the urge to write things down but I refuse to start another journal. I have recently decided to create a loosely-organized agenda. Keeping it all business. Sigh.
My mother, because she loves me, recently sent me a few pages from a middle school diary she found in a box. That was a bad day.
Wait. Only a few pages?
My mid-30s sister recently found an eighth grade diary of hers at our parents’ place and went through it. I was irrationally thrilled when she told me that she considered me a good big brother back in the day. She has no memory of this but, as I told her, the reality is that I pretty much won by default because our brother, the middle child, had ISSUES.
Also fyi, My Mad Fat Diary is available to watch on Youtube and is really really good.
oh man, some of those episodes made me ugly-cry like I haven’t ugly-cried in a loooong time. so good.
Seriously, do not watch around other people, or if you need to do anything for the rest of the day. (Goddddd it’s so goooooood though.)
Thank you thank you thank you. I am loving every single moment of this show. Achingly beautiful and heart wrenching and spot on.
Anachronistique – I didn’t heed your warnings and now i’ve been up half the night. 🙂
I recently scoured my age 12-16 diaries to find any reference to worrying about being gay, because I know I worried about it ALL THE TIME back then, and all there was was a final psychological break at age 16 being like “OKAY, I’m just gonna put this out there — could I….maybe….no. No, that can’t be right. Ok, good talk, diary.”
Then I used Livejournal to talk about how pretty ladies are and then all my friends there came out annnnd there we go. Communal journaling and How It Benefits the LGBT Community.
I would be horrified if my scribbles saw the light of day. I use journaling as a place to dump emotions as I’m sorting through. When I’m happy with you, you will not be featured at all, when mad or confused, it will be a lot of “I HATE YOU SO MUCH AND THIS THING YOU DO AND YOUR FACE IS STUPID.” If people I loved read my journals they would get this terribly slanted impression that I hated them so much and it was barely all I could do to tolerate them. That would be terrible. I’m going to burn them as I write them now.
Yes, this! Especially in the case of exes (and break ups are the time I need the journals the most), it’s pretty much all negative because I was a) venting and b) trying to convince myself that I was better off without them. What ends up in my journals is definitely not representative of how I feel about people as a whole, and I would never want the people in question to think my journal opinions are what I actually think of them!
I think I still have some of my middle school diaries, but I have never really been very good at keeping up. But I don’t really care if anyone finds them. I have fanfic out there. My Twitter account exists. It’s pretty much all out there already.
I have fanfic out there. I care VERY MUCH if anyone finds it.
Haha, I will show mine to anyone who asks, even though it is embarassing.
I think I still have some of my middle school diaries, but I have never really been very good at keeping up. But I don't really care if anyone finds them. I have fanfic out there. My Twitter account exists. It's pretty much all out there already.
Haha, I will show mine to anyone who asks, even though it is embarassing.