Throwing Out Old Diaries?

From an entry at 43 Things:

continue writing in my journal

Got to get a new one

I threw away all my old diaries becuase they were just bad memories and the bad energy just made me miserable. I feel lighter now that i got rid of them… Time to start a new journal. One that contains happy thoughts and feelings! I’m so excited =)

Could you ever throw out your old diaries? I couldn’t. They may have some bad memories in them, but I think those are just as important to keep as good ones.

16 thoughts on “Throwing Out Old Diaries?”

  1. I only recently decided to keep my old journals. I used to throw them out because I hated the idea of someone discovering them years from now. Now I think it’s good to keep them because they reveal a lot about who you were at the time vs. who you are today.

    -V.D.

  2. I have a number of old journals I’ve recently been reading through, some with insights and notes I want to keep. But others are painful and I’m not sure I want that energy around me; I’ve read them and learned from my mistakes, so why keep a physical reminder? My solution is to put them in my storage space, which is about a quarter mile from my apartment. I don’t visit that often so I’ll have the journals but won’t have them near me.

  3. I couldn’t. they keep track of myself as I grew up, going from being obsessed with boys when I was younger, because that’s what I was supposed to do, to finding my own hobbies and fun things to do, and writing stories in them next to my boring daily accounts of life, and it’s amazing to see myself, my thoughts evolve from little girl to young woman.
    How many other people have accounts of their life like that?

  4. No way that I would every throw them away. Even though the memories might be painful they are part of who I am. Why put them to paper to just throw them away, I might as well email them.

  5. When I left my husband at the beginning of my divorce process I threw out all my old journals and diaries. I don’t regret it, because he was using my use of keeping a diary as “proof” of my not believing in the marriage. After knowing he had read through everything I had written from the age of 12 to the most current one at the time (32) I just felt disgusted and violated. I destroyed all of them.

    There wasn’t anything in them — I never cheated, never admitted to even THINKING about celebrities… but he always refers to my diaries (even now that the divorce is almost finalized) when he’s trying to get me about something.

    SINCE that purge I have kept all the journals… it was like a frest start for me.

  6. I understand that some journals need to move into deep storage, particularly those from a difficult time, but I think there is value in keeping all the memories. Just please don’t make me have to read them yet.

    Also, I think there are moments when we all want to “start fresh” or “start a new chapter” in our lives and sometimes doing this literally with a fresh, new journal is a symbolic way to move forward.

  7. I have to admit that looking through records of who I used to be isn’t the most pleasant thing, but I there are also some amusing occurrences in the diaries that I had forgotten. Since I wrote about funny stuff on my blog, my diaries have proved very useful for that.

    And for reminding me that I am much better off now than I used to be. :)

  8. I couldn’t bear to throw out my old journals. Yes, some of them are very painful to read, even years after the facts they recount, and they are often embarrassing, but that’s life, and recording my life is why I bother keeping a journal in the first place. Throwing them out will be someone else’s job after I’m gone.

  9. I have journals as old as when I was 10-12 years of age. There are word documents and blog posts I saved on my hard drive and that I still keep, despite their ex-girlfriend laden content. My personal preference has always been that my memories are uniquely mine and if I don’t keep some record of them, I will never be able to go back and remember years from now. For better or for worse, my personal writings tell a story of my life. I hope, one day, maybe my future offspring (or their progeny) would like to read about me.

  10. no, i would never throw them out, despite some unpleasant memories that i would rather forget. i put them in storage, and tell myself not to read them.

    although, every once in a while, it’s funny to through my first diary, that i wrote in when i was 7-12 years old, remembering what it was like to be a child.

  11. Negative energy from a book? That’s hogwash, if I ever heard it. Bad memories don’t lay in books, they lay in our minds. If you mentally heal from past wounds, the books are just documents of the past and not sores.

    I keep old books. Life is about growing and changing, for better and worse, and throwing a piece of paper away isn’t going to take out the “worse” or purge old memories. If anything, rereading the past writings can make you more self-aware and able to mentally move on in life.

  12. HI;

    I have struggled with that question too. To shred or not to shred? I think, if the journals are helpful to you to see your personal growth or are enjoyable reading or your next generation may benefit from or can be used in a disputer or even a law suit or remind you of a decision or promise keep them. However, if they can come into the wrong hands and hurt someone or the emotional catharsis has been effective and is better off not being read again toss.

  13. This is a question with which I am currently struggling. I write in my journal when I’m having very strong feelings that I want to think through or share (in as much as committing thoughts to paper can be thought of as sharing them) so I love having old journals around as a record of my most emotion-evoking life experiences, whether positive or… errr… learning experiences. Something that has started to worry me in the past year, though, is the question of what will happen to the journals when I grow old and die (or god forbid I be in some sort of accident and die young). For me, journaling is a very personal experience and I don’t *want* anyone reading my journals when I’m dead and gone. (One easy example of why is that I don’t want my parents reading entries from when I was young and angsty and wrote insensitive things about them – even though there are many more positive, loving entries.) As much as I value the more negative experiences I’ve had because of how they’ve shaped me as a person, those records are not ones I want to leave behind so I feel like I’m in quite the conundrum. I have notes written at the beginning of all my journals to “please not read, out of respect for my privacy” but who knows how curious even my most respectful relatives may be in the event of my death? This is something that worries me.

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