I could never get myself to keep a journal or diary until just over a year ago. I do wish I had some of those to look back through. It would be interesting to me now to see what a much younger me was thinking. I remember reading through my grandmother's diaries after she passed. They were very factual. On the day I was born (first grandkid and I was born with a collapsed lung so I was in the NICU for a while), the entry said, "Got peas. Karen was born." That's it. And that right there told me so much about my grandmother, especially the grandmother that my mother knew as a young woman.
My other grandmother didn't keep diaries but she did keep letter correspondence. After she died, I read a lot of letters. Letters she wrote back and forth with her mother when her mother was dying of breast cancer. Letters my grandfather wrote to her when they were secretly married but she was in nursing school and they lived apart (and no one could find out or she would be kicked out). Those were kind of explicit and embarrassing! It was weird to think of my grandfather as a lusty young man, lol. But again, they told me so much about them as people.
A few weeks ago an older many (in his 80s) I met in the park said he has this stack of journals and diaries and was thinking of throwing them all away. I thought if I was your child or grandchild, I might want to read through some of those. And yes, we write so many things we might not really want read - but then all of it conveys something about who we are that really no one knows, even the people that think they know us well. So who knows?
I could never get myself to keep a journal or diary until just over a year ago. I do wish I had some of those to look back through. It would be interesting to me now to see what a much younger me was thinking. I remember reading through my grandmother's diaries after she passed. They were very factual. On the day I was born (first grandkid and I was born with a collapsed lung so I was in the NICU for a while), the entry said, "Got peas. Karen was born." That's it. And that right there told me so much about my grandmother, especially the grandmother that my mother knew as a young woman.
My other grandmother didn't keep diaries but she did keep letter correspondence. After she died, I read a lot of letters. Letters she wrote back and forth with her mother when her mother was dying of breast cancer. Letters my grandfather wrote to her when they were secretly married but she was in nursing school and they lived apart (and no one could find out or she would be kicked out). Those were kind of explicit and embarrassing! It was weird to think of my grandfather as a lusty young man, lol. But again, they told me so much about them as people.
A few weeks ago an older many (in his 80s) I met in the park said he has this stack of journals and diaries and was thinking of throwing them all away. I thought if I was your child or grandchild, I might want to read through some of those. And yes, we write so many things we might not really want read - but then all of it conveys something about who we are that really no one knows, even the people that think they know us well. So who knows?
Oh, and it makes me think of Terry Tempest Williams book, "When Women Were Birds". Here's an article about it: https://www.oprah.com/relationships/terry-tempest-williams-when-women-were-birds