l’azile

As I noted recently, these last few weeks, when I have the time, I have been trying to get rid of stuff I have been lugging around for the last, euh, 25 years or so. So I have been looking through a mind-boggling amount of junk that I have never bothered to throw out but also some sentimental stuff such as photos, old letters, mementos as well as the occasional and somewhat important-looking document that I can never decide whether I should keep or not.

I have boxes and boxes that I have to go through and I have not really looked in them in a very, very long time. I usually just store everything in a spare closet from move to move, thinking that I will get around to it… eventually… and then totally forget about it until the next move. But because this apartment has NO STORAGE SPACE, I have no choice now. I have some serious “decluttering” to do.

This weekend, one of the boxes I opened contained my personal hand-written journals. I have kept a diary since 1981. I stopped writing my journal by hand about 10 years ago, around the time I started really using a computer for just about everything possible, not only out of convenience, although that was a big factor, but also because hand-writing is just not as easy for me as it was when I was younger. Though I have to admit, moving my diary from paper to digital file was a source of regret. It just does not feel the same but that is a whole other subject.

So anyway, almost 20 years worth of journals have just been sitting in this box, gathering dust and neglect, several in a rather sorry state. Some of the journals are beautiful, decorative notebooks with rich thick paper but many are just spiral notebooks, like the ones I used in school. And a lot of my journals are just recorded on an insane amount of sheets of paper because when I could not even afford spiral notebooks, I would write on just plain old paper: white paper, graph paper, the back of cheap restaurant paper place mats, basically whatever paper I could get my hands on, that I would then stuff at the end of whatever notebook I had just filled up to full capacity.

I have not really enjoyed this exercise of going through all these boxes. I kind of hate throwing stuff away but mostly, I do not really enjoy revisiting the past. I mean, it is always nice to be reminded of the good stuff but mostly, it just seems like a rather futile exercise, useless even and occasionally strangely disturbing. And so reading my old journals is something I have rarely bothered with. This weekend though, what with them just lying there in that beaten-up old cardboard box, practically pleading “read me, read me”, I could not help myself and gingerly leafed through a few, particularly those chronicling the first two or three years I started keeping a diary.

And in the end, I came to the conclusion that reading your old journals is not a particularly bright idea because it reminds you of a) how young and foolish, stupid even, you were back then and b) how you have not really changed much since (well, minus the young part).