Trashing My Old Journals Helped Me Regain Confidence
Read Time: 3 Minutes
Words by Emmie Hamilton
A nagging feeling haunted me. It echoed in my head, perpetually telling me the same words for years. Decades.
I’m not good enough.
I don’t know how to love.
I am a terrible friend.
I will amount to nothing.
It could have started with my parents’ divorce, or perhaps it was a severe case of middle child syndrome which are both probably real contributors, but ultimately, I blame myself.
I first moved in with my now-husband when I was twenty-one, leaving behind my broken family home with nothing but clothes and a few boxes of belongings. Mostly books, trinkets, and journals from my childhood I couldn’t seem to part with. I told myself I kept them for sentimentality, or at the very least, I could use them as fodder in a future novel. Months went by, then years. I never opened them but they were always there, lurking in the damp corner of the basement.
When we bought our first house, I decided it was time to purge. Living with someone for nine years and adding a baby into the mix adds a significant amount of belongings that needed to be prioritized, yet still, I felt it was important to keep those journals.
After nearly a year of living in our new home, I decided to finally open the dreaded box of memories and tackle what a ten-years-younger me thought would be important to keep.
There had to be twelve of them, at least, ranging in design from Harry Potter to the Backstreet boys, to a fuzzy pink one with its lock long since broken to time. I shuffled through the ripped and stained pages, reminiscing on what I always remembered as the good old days: when I was in my prime, when everything good happened to me.
That didn’t happen.
The gut-wrenching emotional roller coaster was not something I was prepared for. I didn’t write down the good memories like I thought I had. I didn’t write down my first kiss or the fun things I did that day. I wrote about my parents fighting. I wrote about how often I was bullied in school. I wrote about how bad I felt about my body, and the terrible things people closest to me said.
I wrote about how desperately lonely I was.
These journals, filled with torn pages and old notes from friends, and cards from former boyfriends, were all an amalgamation of everything I secretly despised about myself for the past two decades. It took over two days, with many breaks in between, to search inside myself and wonder why I kept these things. Did I believe the things my bullies said to me, that I spent page after page lamenting over? Did I miss past relationships so much that I couldn’t move forward in my own?
I came to one clear conclusion. Holding onto these pieces of the past were preventing me from living my life in the present because some part of me believed the things I wrote about myself decades ago. The feelings I thought I had resolved were actually buried deep down within me, and reading them again reminded me of all the mental roadblocks I had in place for myself.
I did the only thing I could think of to do – the only thing I had refused to do for the past twenty years. I threw them all away.
Gone are the days where I want to cling to the worst parts of me, no matter how transformative those years were. While it is important to remember the past, there is a difference between honoring your past self and glorifying a former life that was the epitome of everything that caused me anguish.
Taking matters into my own hands and deciding what I wanted to remember helped empower me. I can’t change what happened to me or the things I went through; that is the core of who I am, but I can shape the way I view the past. I don’t need to keep it buried deep inside anymore. I don’t need to keep it at all.
Today, I am still a work in progress, but I am proud of who I am. I am happy to stand up for what I believe in, for voicing my opinions, for not letting the embarrassment and shame of the past weigh me down. I had never felt more liberated and free than when I filled the bins with the words I didn’t need to remember.
I felt calm. Renewed. I crave more of that feeling.
Now, as a thirty-something year old, I am on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment, actively searching for what will form the core of who I am as an adult. Am I still scared and second guess myself? Absolutely. There are so many aspects of my life that I have allowed to hold me back: marriage, motherhood, health problems. I always adapted to fill a role born out of necessity, but now I’m ready to find out who I am without a title attached to my name, and without the extra baggage holding me down.
Tossing my journals was the best thing I could have done for my mental health and now I can’t wait to embrace the future and figure out who I really am on the inside.
Are you with me?
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About the Author:
Emmie Hamilton is a fiction author, mother, and amateur candle maker. She received her MFA in Creative Writing and has a certificate to teach online writing classes. In her spare time, she loves to create worlds others wish they were born into. You can often find her chasing her toddler around Disney World. Her debut YA Fantasy novel, Chosen to Fall, released this past spring.
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