I have some ambivalent feelings about leaving a paper trail, especially now that I have children. I have often been quite frank in my writing, and have used writing to work out problems. I sometimes feel that even I don't want to revisit certain times or experiences. Yet, I have thrown out very little of my writing. I can think of a few torn out pages, and one journal written at a particularly dramatic moment in my adolescence (I threw it in the wood stove!).
This photo shows a handful of diaries I kept as a young teen. They are both funny and painful to read. Lots of yearning, goal setting, social complexities, and thinking I had it all figured out. My daughter will be ten years old in June. I know she will go through so many of the same things I did, yet also that she is a completely different person than I was. I don't want her to read these diaries. I don't want them to serve as a model or guide to those difficult teen years. If I was to ever throw out another journal, it would probably be one of these.
After my father died, I learned that he had kept an almost daily journal. He kept it primarily at work, so I never saw the notebooks lying about the house. My mother simply produced a box of them one day when my siblings and I were helping her clean out the house. I am glad to read them. They reveal who my father truly was - often times different than the father I saw everyday. Did he imagine we would read these after his death?
Does anyone else struggle with the issue of what to leave behind?