Who Will Read My Journals After I’m Gone?

No one. I’ll make sure of that.

Do you ever wake up in the morning and the answer to a question that’s been haunting you for a long time suddenly makes itself crystal clear? Maybe it came to you in a dream? Or maybe it was something you watched on television before going to bed that manifested itself overnight? Who knows?

I woke up today with the answer to a question I’d been asking myself for years. What in the hell should I do with my private journals? And finally, this morning, I knew.

Every Saturday and Sunday morning for over twenty years, I sat in bed with a cup of hot coffee and wrote in my journal. I liked the black, hardcover sketch books sold at the art supply store. 5–1/2 x 8–1/2 inches, the pages were clean, weighty, and unruled. Back then my penmanship (I was told) was beautiful. I didn’t need lines and rules to keep things straight and neat. Between the artist in me and the perfectionist, there was no way my lines would slant.

I have over fifty books locked away in a file cabinet in my office. No shit. Fifty. I’ve lugged them around from city-to-city and house-to-house for decades. It’s my past. Every triumph and success, yes. But also, from my late teens until my early 40s, every dirty deed committed and every foul and dangerous thought that’s crawled into my head. It’s all on paper. I feel ill just thinking about it.

This morning I decided. I’m gonna burn them. Set every one of these bitches on fire. And just the idea of that is a big relief.

I graduated from art college at twenty-one and started a career in advertising. For all intents and purposes, I seemed to be a promising young woman navigating her way in the world. I soon had an apartment in a hip part of town, a closet full of very nice clothes, I hung out with a cool and popular crowd of young and creative professionals, and I was making a name for myself.

But the men in my life? What a joke. Liars and cheats, they filled me with disappointment and broke my heart over and over again. But instead of kicking them to the curb, I’d hang in there for a year, two years, four years, and bitch and moan and whine about them on paper. The bulk of my journals, unfortunately, are focused on how unhappy I was with the men I chose.

I’m embarrassed by the sheer amount of time I spent writing page after page of tortured analysis.

I’m embarrassed by the sheer amount of time I spent writing page after page of tortured analysis. Dissecting each relationship and recording every stupid and humiliating thing I did or allowed to be done to me in anguished detail. Geez. I do NOT want to die and leave that shit behind for anybody to read.

And that’s not all of it. I wrote countless pages on the great and not so great moments in the lives of people around me, too. Situations and events involving members of my family, my friends, people at work, business associates. I wrote about their successes and their failures also. Especially if I had a ringside seat to watch.

I’m a tough critic. I’ve always fancied myself an armchair psychoanalyst, with the ability to see what everyone else’s problem is (insert eye-roll emoji here), so I’ve had plenty to write about. But my theories and conclusions were meant for my eyes only. I’d rather die than let my loved ones read what I thought of their wedding, a new girlfriend, or their latest career decision. I could be a brutal bitch, especially if I wasn’t 100% in their corner.

But I won’t beat myself up about that. Not too much. A journal is our safe zone. A place to work things out and reveal our innermost thoughts, right? I just want to be sure that those innermost thoughts never see the light of day. I have to make damn certain that these books, as mortifying and incriminating as they are sometimes, never fall into anyone else’s hands.

I’m late to the party but I just finished watching Apple TV’s The Morning Show with Jennifer Aniston. I’ve always liked her. I didn’t watch Friends but her performance in the movie Love Happens made an impression on me and since then, I’ve felt some sort of inexplicable kinship with her.

She’s got only six books but I’ll bet they’re loaded with dynamite about people she’s worked for and the many actors she’s worked with. Can you imagine?

So it came as no real surprise to read in 5 Celebrities Who Keep A Journal that she’s been keeping a journal since she was thirteen. Like me, she’s recorded her deepest thoughts and feelings about her relationships, her friendships, her work, her family. She considers her journals therapeutic. Writing allows her to clear her head and deal with issues that arise from Jen just being Jen.

She’s got only six books but I’ll bet they’re loaded with dynamite about people she’s worked for and the many actors she’s worked with. Can you imagine? I’m sure there’s some eye-opening info, a goldmine of personal and professional confessions and revelations. Just think of how much the National Enquirer or the Daily Mirror would pay for her honest thoughts about Harvey Weinstein? The Friends cast? Or hubby #1 and his Mr. and Mrs. Smith co-star?

She keeps her journals locked away in a safe. But someday someone will have access to that safe. And her journals. Girlfriend’s got more balls than me. That’s why starting today, mine are going up in flames.