For as long as I can remember, I’ve been told that I hold on to way too much.
Emotions, memories, grudges — and yes, garbage. Or at least, things that most people would consider garbage. From receipts to old ticket stubs, vintage photographs of strangers to losing scratch-offs, my childhood bedroom was always overflowing with objects I was told again and again had no value. Things, I was reminded gently, I didn’t need. Things that belonged nowhere but the trash.
This irrational sentimental attachment didn’t stop at discarded paper. I have vivid memories of walking through stores with my parents as a child, sobbing in the aisles if my hands so much as grazed a toy we had to leave behind, even (or especially) when it was something I didn’t want in the first place. As I got older and went shopping on my own, I always had to buy the first copy of whatever item my hands touched, otherwise they — like the toys — would feel chosen, only to be abandoned and forgotten when I didn’t take them home with me.
For those who have never experienced something like it, my hyper-empathy for these random pieces of daily life probably feels over the top. My problem, though, while emotionally complex, was really quite simple: To me, objects were never just objects. Like us, they had feelings, which I couldn’t ignore. To “lead on” one of these items by touching it, making it feel chosen, then walking away from it felt almost as cruel as doing the same thing to a person.
So if something as small as a fruit sticker label took on a kind of sentience for me, how could anyone blame me for becoming a collector? How could anyone not understand that if I didn’t keep them, they would have no one? If I didn’t keep them, they would be forgotten. And what fate was worse than that?
The appeal of journaling, for someone terrified of letting go, should be obvious: As a written memory, it prevents forgetting. And that, combined with my collecting, could prevent change.
That was the story I told myself, anyway, and this faulty logic stuck for years. My plan seemed foolproof — if I could keep every seemingly useless but emotionally significant object I came across and obsessively record every conversation, interaction and observation I had, I could hold time, and therefore memory, in my pocket.
The problem with this thinking should be just as clear, though: No matter how badly I might have wanted to hold on to it all, object and memory alike, I couldn’t — nobody could. It was an impossible, Sisyphean task and the more I tried to complete it, the more dejected I became in the face of my failure. Collections of objects, once treasured memory-holders, became nothing more than piles of trash shoved in the back of drawers, never to be opened again; detailed daily journal entries quickly deteriorated into once-weekly, then once-monthly then once-never-again diaries, half-filled and forgotten in some lonely corner of my bedroom.
Time and again, I was forced to reckon with the fact that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t reject change by simply holding on to the past. As my memory naturally faded, I would be left with piles of garbage and the repeated reminder that something as fleeting as a saved parking meter receipt didn’t tell me even half as much as I’d hoped it might about where I was the day I’d gotten it, or who I was with or what I felt while I was there. Similarly, no journal entry, no matter how painstakingly detailed, could ever bring me back to a moment lost to time.
Whenever I started over, I would try to be better. Most new journals began with an acknowledgment that I’d been inconsistent in the past, too much of a perfectionist, but that I’d try to be different this time. I’d make fresh rules with each attempt: I can only write in black with this one; only with this specific pen in that one; I can use whatever pen I want, but I can only write about writing, or travel or my dreams here. My efforts to promote “productivity” had the opposite effect, ultimately driving me away from journaling by making it a stressful undertaking rather than a soothing act of self-care.
Unfortunately, understanding what my problem was never helped me get rid of it. It only ever took a few months (and often less than that) to fall off again, the cycle waiting for a fresh wave of motivation — or fear — to wash over me before it reset and started all over again. So, stuck, I submitted myself to the system; I pushed my rock, collected my trash and waited for the urge to journal to overtake me once more.
One of the first things I remember being told upon embarking on the New England Literature Program (known on the streets of Ann Arbor as simply NELP) was to put my own blood in my journal — and no, this isn’t a metaphor for anything. During this nine-credit English program, in which you replace all technology for six and a half weeks with a personal journal (the only coursework you complete during this time), you are encouraged to add anything and everything to what is dubbed your “project” while you’re there: words and otherwise. Blood is certainly an extreme example, but it’s far from the weirdest thing to find its way into a journal — students have been known to add anything from leaves and feathers (fine) to dirt and sweat (getting weirder) to ticks and clippings of their friends’ hair (ah NELP, how I miss you) in pursuit of this mission.
When I arrived in New Hampshire, even the thought of adding any of these things to my journal was enough to shake me — to be so freeform felt antithetical to the idea I’d built in my head of what journaling was meant to be and look like. In the first few weeks, the closest I got to this was hesitantly taping a piece of moss about the size of the nail on my pinky finger into a page. Later, I made a simple collage: a scrap of bark, a leaf from our first hike and a blue jay’s feather I found on the ground — not exactly what I’d call a running start.
For someone so obsessed with collecting all her life, you’d think this would have been easy for me, not to mention obvious — my two loves, writing and trash, brought together in holy matrimony! It should have been a match made in heaven, this new (albeit sometimes gross) kind of journaling. Except, as it turns out, perfectionism is a hard third wheel to cut out of the equation. The more I tried to push myself to try new things, to be experimental, to go outside my comfort zone, the more I felt it — the pushing. If breaking the rules was supposed to feel freeing, why did I suddenly feel so confined?
The answer, I found, was rooted in the same problem I’ve struggled with all my life: I cared too much.
Like with those objects, touched and abandoned in stores as a child; those scraps of paper I couldn’t let go of; those half-filled journals with their oh-so-many rules and detailed retellings of passing moments that might have otherwise been forgotten, I couldn’t let go of the idea of what my NELP experience and journal should look like.
I can’t say what was so different about the realization this time, except maybe the fact it coincided with a time in my life where I simply didn’t have the time or energy to hold on to everything in the same way I had gotten used to doing (what can I say — NELP is great, but it isn’t easy). Whatever the case, though, this time I could feel something giving — a brick sliding loose, a key turning in a lock, a door, long-shut, opening at last. I finally felt, when it came to journaling at least, a sense of real freedom. There was no opportunity to quit this time and wait for inspiration to strike again later — I had to find a way forward now. And that way forward, as it turned out, was letting go.
Frantic recounts of my days turned to simple, bulleted lists. I began adding drawings and other stylistic experiments to my pages. While the number of objects I had access to in the woods remained slim, I felt less anxiety about adding those objects to my journal when I found them. The rules, once so integral to the way I conceived of journaling, seemed to have dissolved before my very eyes. Now, the only voice I answered to when it came to deciding what went in my journal, and how, was my own.
About a month after I returned from New England, I began a new journal. In it, one of the very first things I wrote was a reminder to myself that, as I’d finally realized at NELP, “this journal is an imperfect work of art.”
Today, this reminder remains at the heart of everything I put in my journal. More than just a warning about the dangers of perfectionism, though, it has also repeatedly served as a reminder to me that no chronicling of a life is ever perfect. While journaling and collecting may act as aides to our memory, they are ultimately only that; to expect them to perfectly preserve a life as it is now would be a mistake, one that can only end in disappointment.
For years, I was terrified of change and of forgetting myself in the passing of time. Journaling and collecting were my attempt at escaping that fear, but, in doing so, I unintentionally spent most of my life dreading a future that hadn’t yet come, mourning a past that had long since gone and forgetting that I was living in a present that was quickly passing me by. I can’t say that NELP helped me get over those fears entirely, but this new kind of journaling — junk journaling, we’ll call it — has helped me see a different path. Now, even if I don’t capture every little moment as it happens, I know I can always take comfort in the knowledge that a small piece of that time (in the shape of a leaf, a napkin, a rewards card) can make its way into my journal and, in doing so, preserve a small piece of who I was the day that I found it.
I love my journal today more than I have ever loved a journal before it, and that’s partially because you can see it, that outpouring of love and memory, before you even open it. The spine widens, the pages spread and the book is so obviously full of life that it bends, opens, tells a story without showing us a single page. Where with my old journals I was obsessed with the idea of keeping them “perfect” and “like-new” for as long as possible, I can look at my journal today and see that it is used, loved, full of the time and memory I now know, without a single doubt, it holds. The clinical perfectionism is gone, replaced by something with a pulse.
So if you’re looking for a new summer hobby — and let’s be honest, who isn’t? — consider pulling out an old journal and giving memory-keeping a try. What better time to memorialize in writing than these few special months? But, before you begin, consider the kind of story you want to tell your future self and what kind of journaling might best suit your needs. Because who knows? Perhaps this is the summer you start filling your journal with trash, too.
Statement Contributor Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.
