There Have Always Been Words

Or, what I'm doing with my old journals

In the mid-1990s, I lost my footing and fell into an abyss. I won’t describe the circumstances or the depth of my grief and depression, my dissection and examination of everything that came before and during, or of my stop-and-go journey toward healing. Suffice to say, those were really tough years.

I took to the sanctuary of a series of journals as a tool to help process the intensity of my feelings, and the books have accompanied me ever since. The life I’m grateful to have today bears little resemblance to the one I struggled to crawl out of, but the journals remain—silent reminders of a dark time. Over the years, I’ve wondered what I should do with them. They’re not the kind of journal I’d want to leave behind for anyone to read after I’m gone, and I’ve never returned to them.

I knew I wanted to destroy them. Toss them in the trash? No, that didn’t seem right. Shred them? I simply couldn’t imagine putting the pages where I poured out tender feelings through the trauma of a shredder. In destroying the journals, I wanted to honour the woman who wrote them and worked so damn hard to make it through.

I started thinking in terms of the earth’s elements—fire, water, air, and wind—and how I might harness the power of one of them. First, I thought I would burn them, but the logistics of doing so seemed complicated. I remembered the worm bin I once had and thought how perfect it would have been to create compost to put in my garden and support new growth with my words. Wind? That didn’t seem like a wise or effective option. Then, it came to me one night. Use water, and transform the pages into recycled paper. Something new. A final clearing out. A redemption.

And so, my work began.

I ripped the pages out of each book in turn, tearing them into small pieces and dropping them into a bucket. I didn’t read any of the journals before beginning, but couldn’t help catch a glimpse of the odd phrase while I worked and my heart hurt for the woman who endured. I worked quietly, transforming journal pages into a bucket of torn scraps. My fingertips grew dry and cracked, blackened with pencil graphite and blue with stains from ink. Finally, the work, done, and the bucket, full, I drowned my words in boiling water to start the process of creating a slurry from which to create recycled paper pages.

Now, I wait. Will this work? I don’t know. Over the next few days, I’ll stir the mixture and work my fingers through it until it seems of a consistency suitable for drying. Already, I can see that I might want to rinse to pour off some of the pencil graphite. I have a couple of ideas of how I might use the paper should it turn out, but we’ll see. Maybe I’ll just bury the whole gloopy mess in the garden to feed the soil.

Right now, all I know is that it’s been therapeutic to finally destroy those old journals. Something new will be created in their place, and that’s how it should be.