Would You Burn Your Notebooks?

A prompt for you this week.

“The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.”

Joan Didion

A young teenage Lisette— from my earliest surviving notebook.*

Outsourced memories and snippets of stimuli snatched out of the air. Dream details lost to time. Illegible middle-of-the-night revelations. Personal reflections and deep confessions. Ill-attributed quotations. No sources cited & no consequences. The things you’ll never speak out loud. First draft thoughts and thumbnail sketches. Unedited rambling and mundane checklists and pointless scribbles and blank pages smudged with…something?

1. Who & what are our notebooks/journals/diaries/sketchbooks for?

2. What is most likely to happen to your notebooks, your journals, your sketchbooks, your diary, when you die?

3. And— Is this question keeping you from keeping a notebook in the first place?

As someone who teaches & widely shares my own notebook practice, I’ve heard a lot of people work through these questions. I work through these questions too.

At the end of the day, I consider my notebook an ever-evolving thought-extender— a place where synthesis and digestion happens outside my body. As an artist who is constantly aware of the maker-viewer dynamic, I am incredibly grateful to have a refuge from the constant expectation to share intimate moments and passing thoughts—- particularly online. Part of what compels me to return to my book day after day is the fact that it is totally by and for me.

But there’s this other side of us— we-who-journal— that has been tending this soil, nurturing this private plot, gardening our interiority, planting and watering our thoughts on these pages and who thinks that certainly the glorious fruits of creation within deserve to live on in the light of day.

Part of what makes other people’s private notes so delicious to devour is that they weren’t cooked up for the viewer at all, though. I can tell you that some of the highest engagement I get online is in response to the sketchbook pages I do choose to share. And I adore seeing other people’s pages. But why do we like looking at other people’s private, unedited notes? And how do we feel about someone taking delight in looking at ours?

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Considering what happens with our notebooks in our absence connects us with an idea that can otherwise feel abstract or scary: One day I will die and some of the things I’ve touched will still be here without me.

For some people this sends a shock of fear through their body.

I know one elder who, in preparation for her end-of-life, set her lifetime of dedicatedly-detailed diaries on fire. Why? Because in her diaries she had said a bunch of truly nasty shit about all the people who would be responsible for her care as her health declined. But because she had said all that nastiness to most of their faces as well at some point, it didn’t seem so much about revelation as it was an issue with no longer being able to control her narrative.

I know many folks who’ve intentionally or selectively destroyed years of private writing because the act of writing itself held a therapeutic function and the document remaining felt either too hot to hold or like a byproduct of their healing they didn’t need to keep around. I can definitely empathize with this. My notebooks are where I’ve processed all of the most difficult times in my life — and there are many pages that took years to return to, and some I have no desire to turn to again.

Thinking about what happens with our notebooks when we pass touches on some big nerves with a lot bundled in:

Privacy / Shame

Accuracy / Control

Legacy / Death

And of course, it’s not just our notebooks. There’s increasing concern with what on earth we do with our digital legacies.

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While I continue to consider my own end-of-life desires for my massive notebook archive, I can’t help but notice all the ways these books are already a communication from someone long gone to someone far in the future as I peek back in on myself…

I started that notebook pictured above when I was in middle school & continued it through high school in the ‘90s. Picking it up just now, a Barnes & Noble receipt on which I had scribbled some very-teenage-poetry fell out of the pages and I was transported to that parking lot in Southern Oregon where we hung out on long summer nights drinking Frappuccinos and smoking cloves hoping nobody’s parents would see us. Flipping through these pages, amongst the Pearl Jam lyrics and first-love poetry, I see the very first song I wrote for guitar and the first portrait I can remember drawing of my life-long best friend…

A Prompt For You…

Considering the above questions, write a message to someone reading your notebook/journal/diary/scraps of paper 100 years from now. Fill one page then sign and date it. What you do with it from there is up to you…

*I use the words notebook, journal, diary & sketchbook interchangeably because that’s how I use my own notebook/journal/diary/sketchbook but maybe you have different relationships to these things! I’d love to hear how you keep your thoughts…