Week 2: Burn it to the Ground

Oh, I would absolutely burn my diaries, if I didn’t already burn each entry directly after it had been written.  If I, myself, were not to do it, the people I would ask to burn my diaries in the event of my death (i.e. the people closest to me) are the exact people I would never want to misconstrue my words and be hurt by them in any way.  Momentary feelings are often fleeting and never an image of the bigger picture.  I would never want my last impression on someone I love to force them into a life of focusing on that small piece of the puzzle, forgetting that there’s even a puzzle at all. 

Dominique Browning, in her article, “Burning the Diaries,” talks about how her own curiosity, insatiable at times, led her to go looking for the secrets of others she did not realize she may not want.  This reminded me of a past memory and possibly one of the roots of my resistance to diary keeping.  I had wrongly invaded the privacy of my own mother and had found information I was in no way developed or experienced in life enough to handle.  That information had come out of me in an explosive, hurtful way and I will never forget the pained look of betrayal on her face.  Now that I am an adult, wife, and mother myself, I understand that there were complex feelings and emotions bearing down on her everyday and that any of what she ever went through was hers alone.  I had no more of a right to any of that private information than any person has to another’s.  A person can know all of the factual information surrounding the circumstances of another, but they will never truly know how that other person felt, and it is those personal feelings that govern a person’s actions.

Browning also considers her own children and knows that, eventually, they will “become voraciously curious about what exactly their parents did do, what were their secrets, who were they, anyway” (Browning).  I actually think about this often, and it only helps to strengthen my apprehension at putting my most personal experiences and feelings in writing.  Talking to my mother and hearing her story directly from her is such a better experience than reading it ever could be.  However, I also think often about my own mortality, as many parents do.  Leaving my children unable to hear my story directly, when they are old enough to understand me as a person separate from their mother, is one of my most profound fears.  To combat this anxiety, I write for posterity, to each of them in their own respective journals.  I probably don’t do this as often as I should but I try to make sure that the most life shaping events and how I or they felt during them make it into those books.  This information though, is shaped by me as I want them to hear and understand it.  The voice I give that writing is, I hope, one of love and wisdom.

I think that Jenny Alexander hit the nail square on the head, in her article “Why you Should Never Read Someone Else’s Journal,” when she said “If you read someone’s journal . . . . you will not find the person there, and thinking that you will could give you every which kind of wrong impression” (Alexander).  I would always want to represent myself to any person in my life as genuinely and as much in the appropriate context as I can.  Giving anyone access to thoughts and feelings that do not contextually belong to them would compromise that goal.