What do you do with your past?
Eliza was watching a show this morning and saw a commercial of a girl in a wedding dress. She asked what color my dress was, and I told her I’d show her my wedding pictures later. So, being the child she is, she insisted on seeing them later, so I opened the hope chest and drug stuff out.
We watched the wedding video with the kids, and I was reminded again of all of the things I’d have done differently if I had known then what I do now. I was also struck by how beautiful I was and how gosh-darn skinny Mike was. (And does anyone know where I can have the VHS burned to a DVD?)
And, of course, I started going through the hope chest and looking at the things I’ve kept through the years. I have countless journals, dating back to the early- to mid-80s when I was a teenager. Seriously, lots of journals. I told Mike it was my pre-blogging way of keeping track of things in my life. But blogging does lack the ability to slip a sweet card or a pressed flower between the pages.
I’ve got vinyl records - nothing really valuable… the original Grease soundtrack, darn near every Madonna album made, and a couple of really groovy Disney albums.
I’ve got photos of people whose names I can’t remember, but I also have photos of dear friends that are priceless to me. I’ve got a sweatshirt from my senior year in high school. How I was ever that tiny, I just don’t know. Even in my dreams of being thinner, I don’t dream of anything that thin!
I’ve got scrapbooks from Griff’s first years of school.
And that’s just what I’ve come across thus far! I have to take little breaks or my asthma starts flaring up thanks to all of the dust. But my question is…
Do you keep all of those old journals? Do they affect you now? Are they worth taking up all of that space? Do you just throw them away? Come on… help me out here. Leave a comment. Tell me what you’d do.
Filed under Most Everything | Permalink |Tagged with: hope chest • journals
6 Responses to “What do you do with your past?”
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Yes, yes, yes! Keep those journals. Now that my family is dead, family friends of my growing up years are gone or scattered beyond my address book, and my memory is on a sliding scale, I long for the journals I never had the discipline to keep. I suspect that we go through an embarrassment phase about the way we recorded the past in our youth, but we don’t stay there. We begin to treasure what was, in whatever form it was, as we age. I think of the letters destroyed, the photos left unidentified, and questions I never asked my parents with extreme regret. I always believed that if you couldn’t remember the past it had no meaning. On the cusp of fading memory I recognize the folly of that notion. If I had it to do over, I would keep copious notes on the pleasant and the unpleasant.
But I’ll keep them. Just for you. And you, of course, were always mentioned well… Mike’s mentor, the woman who showed him he could teach and love it. We will forever be grateful to you.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t keep any journals during those times when Mike’s mom was so sick and he was traveling all the time with his classes, and I was sure our marriage was going to fall apart. I guess I didn’t notate the unpleasant so well.
Keep them. I figure that even though I can’t bear to read them some day my kids will.
I absolutely have kept all my journals. I read through them to rehash memories I’ve totally forgotten. I really love to read the parts where I met the hubs. They way I wrote it so non chalantly..”so I met some guy at work, that keeps begging me for my e-mail, I just can’t seem to shake him.”
Glad I found you again..I stopped by awhile ago.
Welcome back! I’ll have to find my journals from when I met Mike and see what I said about him.
Your journals are a reflection of who you are. You have to keep them!
Ok, but if something happens to me and Eliza reads them, she’s coming to you for answers for a good three to four year span of my life. Good luck to you.
You should definitely keep them! I was never good at keeping journals!
You keep them:).
Just think how fascinated we are when a journal from history is discovered. Your will be the same way to your loved ones.
Fascinated… confused… could go either way.