Starting in childhood, I’ve been a prolific diary and journal writer, filling out pages upon pages with introspections and often deep emotional pain. I’ve kept them all. I rarely read back over them as I’ll be honest, most are horrifically painful to read, and easily send me back into a dark place. But neither can I throw them away. Sometimes I wonder whether holding onto them is the right thing to do and all I’m doing is clinging onto a past that has gone. Surely I should be willing to let them go, like everything else? The truth is that I can’t. The journals are the voice of the child, and later the teenager, who had virtually nothing and no one else, and to throw them away feels like dismissing her strength and courage to be her own person even when she felt invisible to the world.

It’s an interesting dilemma though and I often ponder how I’d feel if the journals were taken from me. Would I be devastated or relieved? Would I feel lighter and more present to my day to day self or as if I’d lost a part of me? The time may come when I won’t feel the need to keep them anymore because what they represented has become fully alive inside the self that I now am. In truth, I’m already there, but for now I am honouring the child through their presence.