This week's column

Because I'm too lazy to put it up on my site....

Journals

                

   

   

The chain of events seemed perfectly reasonable at the time.

My mom was moving, and the remainder of my childhood dietrus—my plastic horses, my kazoo, my favorite picture books—needed to be moved from their place in my childhood closet. So did my box of journals.

I’ve kept a journal since I was 6, when a friend of my grandmother gave me a small, white Hello Kitty diary as a present. I wasn’t sure what to write in it at first. I noted the weather. I explained what my parents had done that day, and who I played with and what we did.

At some point in elementary school, I read the “Diary of Anne Frank” and became obsessed with the idea of journaling as a historical record. I tried to be in my journal as I wished I were in life: a girl who sat up straight, spoke kindly to others, made her bed and studied hard.

That didn’t last long.

Eventually, my journals became the private “Room of My Own” that they become for most of us. It was the only place where I allowed myself to have rages, to take mental revenge, to record secret joys, to imagine a future so delicious I couldn’t bear to speak about it to others.

My journals were the place I first circled around the thought that I might be gay. They were where I tried to understand the feelings I was having for other girls, and eventually they were where I meticulously recorded the reactions my friends and family had to me as I came out.

I’m a writer. Writing isn’t just what I do—it’s who I am. Writing, and then reading and re-reading what I’ve written, is how I make sense of the world and how I create the story of myself that I tell to others.

When I lived in Chicago, my journals were scattered everywhere, in boxes and drawers and shelves and old backpacks. But right before I moved back home to New York, I collected all of them in one place. My Hello Kitty journal was there. So were my books of high school questioning and post-college resolution. They were so precious to me that I didn’t hand them over to the moving company; I walked them to my car and drove them across country.

They were the first thing I brought into my mother’s house when I came home. I left them there when I moved into Manhattan, figuring they’d be safer at home than in my new, tiny room.

But my mom was moving. So I got that box and the other boxes remaining at my mom’s and brought them to my apartment, where I left them on the landing while I decided what to do with them.
That weekend, we were having a party, and on a Wednesday night when I came home from work, my roommate said, “Hey, I moved those boxes of yours into the basement so they wouldn’t be in the way.”
OK, I said, and I admit I felt relieved. I didn’t have room for my box of journals. Not under my bed. Not in my closet. It wasn’t clear if we had storage in the basement of my building, but I figured they might as well stay there for a few days. Maybe I’d just leave them, accessible but not likely to be stumbled over in the middle of the night.

On Monday, I went to check that they weren’t getting damp—and they were gone. My other boxes were, too, but I didn’t worry about those.

Childhood books I could replace. My journals I could not. I knew that to lose my journals would be like losing the best friend that had known me from childhood, the friend who could oversee what she knew of my life and point out hidden patterns and forgotten revelations.

I called the super. He threw the boxes out, he told me. They were unlabeled; he thought that they were trash left by previous tenants. He reminded me, gently, that we had no storage.

My journals are gone.

I still can’t quite believe it. I look under my bed again and again, as if the situation might have changed somehow, as if they will magically appear if I just wish hard enough.

Those collected books were where I narrated my life. Losing them was losing the long line of words that kept my life together.

Philosophers sometimes talk about life as a river, how the river itself stays the same though each individual point is always rushing with new water, always changing.

Losing my journals is like hiking along that river and looking back to see that the entire bed behind me is dry.

What can I do but keep writing? I started a new journal yesterday. Its blank pages were a reprimand, a reminder, a warning. Whether it is a caution to keep better track of my written words or not write them down in fragile books at all, I don’t know.

Jennifer Vanasco is an award-winning, syndicated columnist based in New York. Email her at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. Her occasional blog is at jennifervanasco.typepad.com.

 

Comments

[jo]

ugh, this makes me very very sad..

[Jay]

Thanks, Jo. It helps to hear that....

[Rob]

I'm sad, too... for two reasons.

1. For you, of course, that sucks, losing all that history... probably a reason I never kept journals until I started blogging, I was always afraid this is what would happen.

2. And, a bit more selfishly, I'd like to think I was in some of those pages... I feel like a little of me was lost, too. :)

[LD]

I'm so sorry Jay, that breaks my heart!

[Jay]

Thank you Rob, thank you Laura.

It really does ease my heart a bit for others to feel theirs crack slightly.

Rob, you were certainly in there! I wish I read them over recently, so I could remember what I said.

[Mary]

At first I was sad for you - and the loss of material for your memoirs - but then thought about all you've been through over the past few years and can't help but think of your new start, clean slate and shedding skin. I think we never consider that shedding what no longer fits us, may hurt as we let it go. If you really needed the journals to have a history-memory-connection to events or people-would you have left them on the landing and then been ok with them being in the basement?

Maybe it's all part of refining what's really imprtant to you about your past life?

[Jay]

Oh, I LOVE that idea! That it's part of a shedding of old skin.

That might be the thing that helps me let them go.

Thanks, Mary.