How does a person lose track of their diary?

April 4, 2019 4:55 PM

“The act of the diary strikes me as so deeply human.” a longform comic on lost and found diaries.
posted by Grandysaur (20 comments total)

Her fondness for reading other people's diaries reminded me of something:

Several years ago I stayed at a little inn along Big Sur called Deetjen's. It's a gorgeous little historic indie inn, with most of the rooms clustered in two or three buildings huddled next to each other on the grounds. Also, each room also has an in-room diary, which guests are encouraged to read and then add to.

I'd booked a night in their smallest room, which was only big enough for a twin bed and a nightstand, with the book sitting on it. So obviously the room had a lot of solo travelers - and so the book was filled with all kinds of soul-baring stuff from people on their own various solo journeys; young men or women on the way to find themselves, a recently-widowed man still grieving his late wife, older women taking themselves on retreats after divorces...and one giddy-sounding backpacking couple who gigglingly wrote about trying to fit the both of them into the twin bed. I think I was up until 2 am reading it before making my own contribution.

It was a profoundly humbling window into common humanity. There are things that man wrote about his late wife that I will never forget; I never even met her, or him, and I could feel how much he missed her.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:20 PM on April 4, 2019 [38 favorites]

I loved the balance of imagery vs. writing in that. If I look over my old Metafilter askmes and answers, there's enough of them now that it nearly forms a diary...and from the headline, I thought it was going to about losing track of dairy intake.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:50 PM on April 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is wonderful. Such a good job of illuminating the meaning, process, and feel of writing diary or journal entries. I really liked her insight about writing for imaginary readers--"your diary is never all the way true"
posted by librosegretti at 6:08 PM on April 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

I loved her handwriting! The note about the careful crossed out z and then the mixture of different styles she used flowing over pictures or lined up as small quotes in beautiful calligraphy or print depending on what she wanted to say.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 6:32 PM on April 4, 2019

A friend found a diary, written in 1914, in a car about to be junked. How this very old diary ended up in not-that-old Camry is unknown; but knowing my old book obsession, he gave it to me.

The unnamed woman who wrote it was around 70; they lived in Pennsylvania; they had a farm. She had family and a hired girl who helped. She wrote daily; and it fascinated me. The chickens, ducks, and eggs they sold to what I guess was a store; washing days; baking days; sicknesses; deaths; and a hanging. I so badly wanted more of her story but I never even learned her name...

As the author revealed, I also have been a lifelong diarist. And I believe I have all of them...but I'm not sure. Maybe I too have left a bit of myself out for the world to find.
posted by annieb at 6:52 PM on April 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

Ha! I am just winding up a very long project of reading through, transcribing bits of, and then throwing out my own journals/diaries, about 60 of them (Moleskines, composition books, Leuchtturms, etc), dating back to 1991 (that's the continuous run; there are others dating back to 1963, but there are long gaps).

Some of it I shredded because I would really hate to have anyone read those parts. Most of it is boring as all get-out. A good bit of it is revelatory and some of it I don't remember at all. Drawings, short stories, poems, analyses of literature, ruminations about the recurrent themes of my life, and here and there, the events of my life, set down fresh and contradicting my current memories of them.

I have been wrestling with re-reading them because I felt as if I was experiencing some of the most stressful and unsuccessful experiences of my life (taking care of my mother, struggling with my dissertation, failing and quitting a job that was my dream career), and finally came to terms with it by realizing it's just a story, and much of it has nothing to do with me, here, now.

And one volume I lost, somewhere in 1997 or so. I will never know what happened in March and April of that year. Somehow I don't care, because I am down to three volumes and I wonder if my existence will end when I throw out the last one :)
posted by Peach at 7:37 PM on April 4, 2019 [5 favorites]

I have also been rereading my teenage diaries recently, but despite the embarrassment in their contents (obsessing about Smiths lyrics for way too many pages) I cannot bring myself to throw them out. One is missing, just like the author's, and I don't know where it went, especially as I wrote in a special hieroglyphic code throughout (and hid the key in the diary spine!). Maybe someone somewhere will find a fat little book with a Smash Hits sticker of Jim Kerr on the front and it'll be returned to me by the universe.

Not quite a diary, but at an estate sale I bought four binders full of Xeroxed, typed letters from a woman to her two nieces. They start out in the late 1980s when the girls are preteens and continue until they go to college.

The Aunt, as I think of her, is a wise, amused, observant person who talks about the owls in the tree behind her home, and what she bought at the farmers' market, and so much minutiae of her life. The later letters get shorter and less descriptive, and more of a laundry list of her health issues, but it's clear that the Aunt still has lots to share with her nieces.

I don't know what happened to the Aunt -- I have her full name, but there are no obituaries out there. I found one of the nieces on LinkedIn and wrote to her, asking whether she wanted the binders, but didn't hear back. After reading this lovely article, I think I'll try again.
posted by vickyverky at 11:31 PM on April 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Thanks for posting this. I'm glad to have read it.
posted by medusa at 11:50 PM on April 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Last night while walking home from hacky hour I came across a pile of belongings clearly stolen from a homeless person. I dug through the stuff and found two notebooks. They're full of prose that's either/or poetry and song lyrics. They smell like a cross between cologne and homeless person stank.

There's a phone number in the front of one of them and I called it and told Chris where his stuff was that night and that I had his notebooks and left my number.

By this afternoon I hadn't heard from him and the stuff was gone from the sidewalk.

I've met a guy named Chris on the streets nearby 2-3 times, I wonder if it's him.

Here's one of his later drafts:

There's a land of short existence
I came to find her bathing there
Her world of whims and daydreams
That only I can see
Apprehension caves and crumbles
Forever lives in her stares
Does she live in a world behind me
A land I cannot bear

Just leave me here tonight
Regret can have me tomorrow
When my war of heart and mind
Has been waged somewhere deep inside
I will never hide or surrender my beliefs
With nothing left to spare
Somewhere in her stare
I'll find my lovely reverie

As her eyes become a memory,
All regret will fall to dust,
In the echo of her laughter,
Inhibition turns to rust.
Another love has flown me further,
To a land I don't belong,
As I turn to wave goodbye,
She is already gone.

- Chris Ward, Portland, Oregon
posted by bendy at 4:12 AM on April 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

This was such a pleasure to read and beautifully put together. It really resonated with me.

Last time I visited my parents overseas, I made a point of bringing my childhood and teen-hood diaries back home with me. Looking through them is surreal. I have a lousy memory, so I don't remember most of the things I thought were important enough to write about. Some of it doesn't feel like me at all. Other parts jump out to me, little kernels of who I would grow to be. The comic mentions that her childhood journals are more focused on documenting things, and adult journals are more about working out feelings in the present, and that definitely holds true for mine as well.
posted by Gordafarin at 4:16 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

A few years ago I bought a document scanner - the kind that lets you load in a stack of pages, scans both sides and then saves them to your hard drive.

I sliced all the pages out of my angsty adolescent journals and scanned them and they're now folders full of PDFs on my hard drive.

I'll probably never look at them again but I would hate to get rid of them so I made this compromise.
posted by bendy at 4:21 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

This was really lovely!

A few years ago, I had some of my old journals from my early teens shredded. They documented a bad time in my life that I'm still trying to heal from, and I don't actually remember a lot of it. Having records in my home of traumas I don't remember felt really dangerous and awful. I know people always say you'll regret getting rid of stuff like that, but for me it has made me feel a lot safer to know that those records are gone, and that I can keep moving forward.
posted by ITheCosmos at 4:44 AM on April 5, 2019 [4 favorites]

This is lovely.

If you love this, i can recommend the podcast "adults read things they wrote as kids". Not always diary. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, the host often asks the reader to reflect on who the person that wrote that diary was and who they have now become.

I would like also to recommend a defunct BBC radio show "My teenage diaries" where famous people read their teenage diaries. It always end with "what would you tell your teenage self?" And "what would your teenage self tell you?"
posted by thegirlwiththehat at 4:56 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

I've found and read personal documents of others on the street and it made me feel kind of dirty. One was a thing some teenage girl had written about how much more she loved pot than anything else. Another was like a really sad letter from someone to their departed SO, pleading for them to try again. Why were these things just discarded? In the first case, I can imagine why - at least two reasons. The second too, really, but it's so sad that the recipient just threw it on the sidewalk instead of at least putting it in the trash. They may have had more than enough of that kind of shit, of course.
posted by thelonius at 5:38 AM on April 5, 2019

See also Found magazine.
posted by bendy at 5:51 AM on April 5, 2019 [1 favorite]

I have all but two of my journals and sketchbooks (it's not a hard line between the two) - I destroyed the one from when I was eight a few years later, and I think my mom tossed the next one, which was ages 10-12. The rest of them are in a bookcase in my bedroom and there are more than 100 of them, because this is how I process existing on this planet.

I liked the comic a lot, but it made me sad, too. I wonder if the diary came to the used bookstore in a box of books a relative had cleaned out after a death without looking closely. I also wonder if someone stole it - in college a friend had his backpack stolen, with the journal inside, and really freaked out. He didn't care about anything else in the backpack, but really wanted the journal back. It never turned up, and eventually he moved on from it, but it was something that really stuck with me because I would have been similarly devastated to lose control of the hard copy of my brain like that.

In conclusion, I need to make a will that requires my journals to be destroyed with my corpse, possibly after someone does science to my corpse, and then everything mixed with the ashes of my cats who have passed. I'm not Franz Kafka, and I post pretty much everything I'm down with other people seeing online or in zines (or both, most of my zines are up on qzap), and to me this is just so private. Like, if I found out a friend or lover was reading my journal, we would probably break up on the spot and never speak again kind of private.
posted by bile and syntax at 6:02 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

I didn't want my kid to have to destroy my journals, because I had to wade through all my mother's writing after she died. It was wrenching, it meant i had to go through losing her all over again, and it was a lot of work. But then I have also deleted all my Facebook entries and I keep only a week's worth of my Twitter posts.
posted by Peach at 6:19 AM on April 5, 2019 [3 favorites]

I started writing diaries when I was 10.
A couple years ago I burned them all. It was like a perfect crime, like secretly commiting suicide.
posted by otherchaz at 7:24 AM on April 5, 2019 [6 favorites]

See also, Mortified.
posted by kaibutsu at 6:01 PM on April 5, 2019

[CW: Suicide] Sometimes losing a diary is a good thing. As I've written about elsewhere on MetaFilter, my cousin killed himself about 15 months ago and my brother and I took on many of the aftermath duties, including dealing with the truck in which he shot himself. The truck was towed to a company that specializes in these situations and we went later to deal with the paperwork and retrieve any belongings that were salvageable. The widow was especially interested in knowing if her husband's journal was in the truck; he was very secretive about it and she'd never read it and was looking for clues, because his death took her completely by surprise. So we inquired about it.

The shop's owner/manager, who was very kind, told us that he had found it, flipped through it, and it was harrowing and awful. In fact, it was so disturbing and sad that, after just a few glances, he had a physical reaction to it and didn't want to see any more. He was adamant that we shouldn't read it and that we definitely never should let my cousin's wife near it. And so, even though the diary was in the glove compartment and unscathed, he had thrown it into the dumpster.

We were torn. But we had a model for what to do: the widow had also asked us to obtain, from the local police, a recording of my cousin's 911 call telling first responders where to find his body and his suicide note, which had been taken as evidence. She asked us to listen to/read these items and then decide whether she should be exposed to them now, later or never. So we thought this diary probably fell into the same category and explained all this to the shopkeeper.

As the three of us walked towards the dumpster, the shop owner tried to talk us out of it by telling us a few things he remembered from riffling through the pages. When we compared notes later, my brother and I both turned out to be deciding against collecting the diary based on the shop owner's reportage and thinking through the ethics of lying to the widow. We arrived at the dumpster and the shop owner tried one last time to dissuade us, noting that by now the diary was probably buried under a lot of other unpleasant stuff. And then he flipped back the dumpster lid.

The dumpster was empty. By some providence, the garbage haulers had come early and the diary, and everything else, was gone. We were so happy to be able to truthfully report back that it was too late... and we never told anyone what the shop owner had revealed about its contents.
posted by carmicha at 10:15 AM on April 6, 2019 [2 favorites]