Dusty, old journals everywhere

How do I need thee?

The last two decades of my life are sitting three feet from me, in a cardboard box, among the towering piles of clutter we call storage around here.

Years of torment, self-torture, suffering as a teenager, and a single young woman lie dormant in one medium-sized box.

I pick one up, read the dates, start reading the entries. They are full of sadness, full of gloom with sparkles of the sunniest memories my mind can imagine. There is something joyful inside me whenever I think back to remarkable heartbreaks.

But, do I need to relive those memories to move forward? As I pour through book after book, I am realizing that I am forgetting things that used to haunt my life so very much. How I loved that one boy, a family friend, so much and how I never truly understood why he didn’t like me. How I always felt alone, even when I wasn’t. And, then, there were the mistakes. The dreadful, what-did-I-do, mistakes?

I could drop those journals, all of them, in the trash and be done with those memories. After all, how many memories have I forgotten because they were never written down? Perhaps the best memories, the most vivid ones, are ones that the mind will automatically remember.

Maybe I’m holding on to something by holding on to these journals, which until blogging entered my life were never really given much thought. I knew only that they were glimpses of my past, easy page-flips to take a stroll back in time, to the times of adversity and struggle that brought me to this very spot right this very moment in this old city attic.

On one hand, it’s great to be able to see clearly the road that made me who I am today. On the other, I’m already me, why do I need to know how I got here? Nothing will change by re-reading these journals, right?