Yesterday I did something I have been thinking about doing for years.

I dug out the journals I’ve written over the past twelve years and shredded them all. There were quite a few. It took quite a while.

The reason? Quite simply, I did not want to leave so much of my unfiltered thought laying around for someone to read. Not that I think anyone’s going looking, mind you. I’m not that interesting. But you never know…

You see, I’ve been agonising over whether to ditch these journals for years. I almost did it a few months ago. I picked up the stack, opened the first one, dated 2004, and started reading. It was odd reading my thoughts from so long ago, yet everything was still intensely familiar. My ideas, struggles, worries, joys and tedium were all there on the page. I remembered living through it, though admittedly, I did not remember it in the technicolor detail of my journal.

And so, overwhelmed by nostalgia, intoxicated by the feeling of dipping  so authentically into that snapshot of a moment in time, I decided I could not destroy the journals. They were proof of my existence, faithful documents of my emotional footprint on this earth. Weeks went by, and still, the journals’ presence in my bookshelf was a source of constant worry. Because in amongst the tedium, were some entries that were so raw, and so private that I could not bear anyone – ever – to read them. After failing to dispose of my journals the first time, I told my daughter that if I were to die, she was to destroy all my journals immediately. She looked stricken. I understood this. If my mother had told me the same thing at any time in my life, I know I could not have carried out the deed. Especially after she died. Imagine throwing away such a gem. Imagine the intensity of the desire to glimpse the hidden side of someone you love. No matter how difficult it would have been to read private thoughts that might have forced me to see the mother I knew in a completely different – and perhaps confronting –  light, I knew I could not have turned away. Once she was no longer in this world, and with journals in my hands, I know I would not have been able to keep that promise. I could not leave them closed and secret, thereby erasing an important window into her past. I knew my daughter would act in the same way if faced with that conundrum.

And so the journals are all gone now. Shredded and placed in the bin. I feel lighter, less anxious about someone reading them. But I have lost something precious. That I know. All those years, all those thoughts, rumination, reflection; all those attempts to frame and configure my life into a shape I could grasp and understand. All that writing done in order to figure myself out, to plan a better way in which to live, to let ideas float around uninhibited so that confusion might give way to clarity and action would result. All gone.

The words I wrote over all those years are now in six large garbage bags in our bin. I am sad that I had to erase them, and in that action, lose some of the telling details of my own life. I remember what happened, I was there. Yet reading my journals gave me a more raw, authentic version of what I remember. Memory is kind to us. Thankfully, remembered events are often not as difficult or painful as the real thing. But sometimes we lose the sharpness of the joy, too. We remember happiness, but its outrageous luminosity is somewhat faded, made commonplace, by the intervening years. It is taken for granted.

I have lost all those telling details. Despite a last-minute reading of some of the entries, even the most poignant bits may not stay with me.

Writing is precious. It takes us back, and hands us the person we were a long time ago. Not much else can do that. Even photography or film can’t get inside our heads the way writing does. Writing about ourselves is a courageous and soul-baring action. It is like putting a piece of our body on the page. I suspect that is the reason that casting it away feels like losing a limb.