I Burned My Journals & Dumped the Ashes in the River.
By: Emily Ann Peterson
Tags: Journaling, Productivity, Community, Writing, Writing Life

I Burned My Journals & Dumped the Ashes in the River.

Here’s Why…

Over the years…

I’ve adopted the daily practice of expressing myself.

It simply sustains. It sustains me and therefore sustains as a prominent place in my daily life.

It started as innocently as my 13-year-old self, with a daily “Dear Diary.”

As a teen, I tore through blank notebooks and journals like a famished omnivore at a Korean BBQ restaurant.

Alongside this teenage daily writing, I also practiced music daily. When my proficiency began to allow it, this musical and written expression became the outlet for that which I was not allowed to say out loud.

There were opinions, stories, desires, lightness and darkness on the pages and hidden between the musical notes. I wrote words and played music because I soon discovered that if I stopped the expression, I stopped living.

This daily practice of self-expression staved off a full-on crisis of mental illness. I know I’m not the only one for whom this is true.

Expression saved my life.

By the time I was 25,

I had collected a huge box of journals filled with memories, traumas, joys, inside jokes, first dates, first kisses, frivolities, camping trips and growing up.

The box of journals I had collected was impressive, but heavy.

I couldn’t continue carrying this box around for forever. Lugging that thing around from house to house in my twenties was getting really old. So, per the suggestion of a friend, I began to transfer ‘the important stuff’ into an electronic archive.

I picked a journal at random.

FIVE hours later, I had the first journal ‘archived’ but had acquired a brain-splitting headache. It was exhausting to be reminded of things people had said, feelings I had purged, and days of my life I had long forgotten. Some memories were fun to recall.

I had forgotten most of these on purpose. I had worked very hard to whitewash them from my mind.

I knew I couldn’t make it through 20+ more journals just like it. The archiving unearthed it all and I was no better for it.

What I realized: the journals had already served their purpose.

They had given me a forum. They gave me the place to lay out my insides and start the day from a safer place.

The blank pages were the lenses which had allowed me to truly see myself in the present moment. I didn’t need to be reminded of the bits and pieces of the stories that didn’t matter in the long run.

So I burned them all.

It took several hours of poking at the fire. Every once in awhile, I could see a word on a burning page. Through the bonfire, those flashes of memory were enough of an archive for me. I threw the ashes into the nearby river.

It was time for those words to move on. It was time to collect new words. It was time to express new life.

I still write everyday.

Usually first thing in the morning. Usually for 15 minutes, but sometimes a lot longer.

I write on anything: my smartphone’s note application, a blank text document, a plain piece of paper, the back of an old bill.

When the writing comes to a close, I throw it away, immediately.

I delete, rip up, and shred it because I need to.

Trashing my daily writing lets me say my peace and then get on with life

& frees me from the fear that someone might discover…

what I really think about so’n’so how much of an imposter I truly am what a whiney bitch I am about everything. how lazy I really am [fill in the blank]

You see…

The blank page is the kindest permission and deepest forgiveness I have to offer myself, and in turn the world.

Not only that, but…

The Added Bonus of Daily Expression?

When I sit down to write or stand up to perform music, I have a clear and smooth channel to the unfettered parts of me.

Those are the parts I wish to reveal to my audiences.