Befriending My True Self
thoughts on keeping and destroying journals
A few weeks ago, I spent a couple of days with my brothers and sisters emptying out the house we all grew up in, preparing it to be sold. (I wrote about that in this post.) I had a lot of feelings about it, but I left with an unshakeable uneasiness my own home, and about the things that I wouldn’t want my children to have to carry home in boxes to be evaluated, pored over, and to decide if they should be kept in a closet somewhere or thrown away and forgotten.
This led me to my bookshelf, where I have hundreds of journals that I have written over the last 30 years.
If you have been around a while, you know that journaling is an essential practice for me. I have created a journaling course, given talks about journaling at women’s events, I make journals, and I carry a journal around with me everywhere I go. Journaling is the absolute intersection of my creative and spiritual life. It is where I have my best ideas and keep them safe till I can come back around to them. It is how I think, how I understand what I feel, how I pray, how I move from discontentment to a life of gratitude, how I seek and find the beauty behind these often crazy, chaotic days of raising a houseful of children where the needs never stop and I am living a very different life from the one I once imagined for myself. Journaling allows me to work out my faith with fear and trembling, to see God in everything, and to surrender more fully to the work He is doing in my life.
But there is a lot of stuff in there that I don’t want anyone to read. Because I have written, uncensored, what I am thinking and feeling. And I don’t want everyone to know that.
I don’t want to say, “When I’m gone, destroy my journals.” Because there are so many evidences of God’s faithfulness in there that I want my children to know. I also want them to know me, and to know how much I loved them, and for my memories of them to live on.
So I have been purging my journals, which is a little complicated, but feels really good.
I told myself I would just come home and grab all of the journals I wrote from ages 18-22ish, not even crack the first page, and mercilessly destroy them. These were the years when I had so much to process that I could only afford to write in cheap spiral notebooks. The years where my husband and I were dating, trying to figure it out, where I wrote in way too much detail my thoughts, feelings, fears, and desires. The slow realization that I was falling head over heels, our blossoming love story, our eventual break-up, a shaky getting back together and eventual resolution that we both wanted to make it work forever.
But I opened the first page. And I was instantly transported back in time to this younger version of myself and had so much compassion for her. I read through the book, and whenever I read something that was embarrassing or hurtful, I just ripped the page out. I kept the passages that I would want to read again or wouldn’t mind sharing.
When I got to our break-up journal, I had to rip out most of the pages. As I was ruthlessly pulling them out, thinking about the future me who would never have to read this angsty garbage again, I came across a page that made me laugh.
I was suddenly sharing a joke with my past self, actually living out what the younger me was dreaming of—being finished with the present drama, having some kind of happy ever after that would set me free from needing to hang onto these words. I passed through the trail. I married a man I loved. We are happy, even though we are the same people who were so unhappy with one another at that moment so long ago. I don’t need these words to help me figure it out anymore.
And I felt a gentle confirmation and permission to go ahead and purge the journals. It’s what my past self was planning, and I imagine my future self will be relieved if I’ve already done it. So I am taking these notebooks, a couple at a time, reliving those days one last time, hanging onto what is useful or insightful and letting go of what haunts me.
The very last page of the break-up journal was a prayer I wrote for the woman that Randy would one day marry. At that point, I was sure it would not be me. But imagine my surprise, over 20 years later, to see that it was me. I read it with such gratefulness, because I knew it was a hard prayer to pray, and I did not see that the future me would be the one who saw that prayer come to pass. It was a touch-point across lives, a shared understanding, a kindness that I felt deeply.
I see journaling as a way of befriending my true self. I have become a very different person, but I feel a tenderness for the younger me. She understood so little about life. She thought it was about one thing, but it was something different altogether. I know that in 20 years, I will look back on the version of myself that is writing this letter and likely feel the same.
Over the last twenty years, I have changed the way I write in journals. I still write things that are raw and unfiltered, sometimes harsh and too revealing to share, but I no longer leave them in my books. I offer the words up to God, rip them up, and immediately destroy them. It is helpful for me to write them, but I know it will not be helpful for me to relive them or to burden my children with them one day in the future. (And as I have said before, it is okay to burn a journal.) I am not trying to paint a perfect picture of my life, but I have come to realize that it does me no good to keep a record of wrongs. Ultimately, the journals are for me and no one else. I get to choose what I want to remember and what I want to be remembered from my own writing. And I hope that if my children decide to divide my journals and carry them to their own homes one day in the distant future, it will be a blessing, and not a burden to them. That only what is valuable will remain.
Dear friends,
Wishing you a week of beautiful moments, of holding on to the things that bring you joy and peace, and letting go of what does not serve you. Thank you so much for reading these weekly letters. It means so much to me that you are here.
Love,
Mackenzie
UPCOMING:
Rosie’s show at Fender’s Alley in Cornelia, Ga is this Saturday from 6:00-7:00 p.m. Hope you can make it! Rosie will be playing about half of the show solo, and she will be joined by some super-cool friends, a couple of amazing brothers, and her awesome dad. It’s going to be a great show.
Also, check out Rosie’s new website! www.rosannachester.com
Her new album is going to be released in a few weeks—stay tuned. Subscribe to her substack
to get all of her updates.From the Archives:
New to journaling? This podcast is for you.
Click the link to learn more about my 6-week video journaling course, Innermost Journaling: Mining the Depths of Your Sacred Everyday Life.