Many years ago, I burned my childhood journals.
I used to journal all the time.
But when I was 19 and 20, I was in a bad relationship.
I knew he was jealous, which was I was familiar with, since my mother had always been in violently jealous relationships.
I told myself that at least my relationship wasn’t physically violent.
It’s a long story, and there were incredible mistakes on both sides leading up to this, but I was incredibly unhappy. And this relationship had been legalized, which made it harder to get out of.
At this point, I thought I couldn’t get out of it. I sometimes prayed that I would die or that he would, mostly the former because I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would pray for the latter.
It’s hard to hide that kind of unhappiness.
I came home one day to find that he’d been reading my journals. And he was yelling at me about them.
Why didn’t I love him the way I loved that guy I had a crush on when I was 14?
(The guy I had never really had a conversation with.)
I tried to explain how fourteen year old brains work.
And I also tried to explain that he shouldn’t read my journals (trying to explain back then, by the way, was yelling and crying).
He said he had every right to–that since we were married, we were one flesh.
I didn’t have the right to privacy.
I knew he believed that–that he would always feel justified in reading them, whenever he wanted. Every thought I had written down, every thought I might write on the blank pages would be used against me in his struggle to make me into what he thought I should be.
So I burned them.
And I stopped journaling.
It’s been over twenty years–I haven’t gotten back into the habit of regular journaling.
But I want to.
