Burning Words, Angst and Other Baggage: Patch Editor's Notebook

Before I tell you what I did the other day, I should clear up a few things:

I’m not facing death, any more than any of the rest of you are. Theoretically, I could walk out the door and stare down death via an out of control car on my front lawn or, more likely, die freakishly at the paws of my cat, who opened a vein on my hand the other night and caused me to nearly lose consciousness from blood loss.

I digress. All I mean to say is that none of us gets out of this alive, at least not in the physical sense. (I’m not inviting a theological debate, so don’t. Just don’t.) And the truth is, we’re all lucky to be alive, or so says a TV news director pal who shamed reporters off the set if they dared say a person escaping death was “lucky to be alive.”

“Hell,” he would say, “we all are.” He also was a stickler for succinct writing, so I’ll get on with what I did.

Just know there was sense of urgency or foreboding when I decided to toss about 20 years’ worth of handwritten journals into a bonfire – a primal act that filed me with renewal, rebirth as the pages curled in the fire.

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• What have you done recently to lighten the load?

All that baggage is gone. So is the written record of the struggles of a much younger woman whose feelings were too easily hurt and whose decisions were too often made in haste. Between us, I was a hot mess – not in the Miley Cyrus, for the sake of hygiene if nothing else put that tongue back in your mouth sense, but tentative and unsure.

Writing in the journals was cathartic and therapeutic, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who’s trying to work through things. Acting as one’s own analyst is probably as foolhardy as representing oneself in court, but I found that once I’d penned an emotion or position on something to paper, it was impossible to deny.

“They named names and revealed, metaphorically speaking, where the bodies were buried. They contained snippets not only of my story, but others’. ... They spilled secrets ... and agonized endlessly about bad boyfriends and good ones.”

I might take it up journal-writing again, in a more disciplined form that avoids aimless streams of consciousness that filled the pages now reduced to ash.

But those journals needed to go.

They named names and revealed, metaphorically speaking, where the bodies were buried. They contained snippets not only of my story, but others’ who certainly never gave permission for them to be devoured by strangers. They spilled secrets and details of private conversations, delivered smack-downs I wanted to spit out to mean girls but (thankfully) never did, and agonized endlessly about bad boyfriends and good ones.

Before their smoldering end, I made myself read each page, then vowed to leave them closed. It was painful and threw me off balance, as if I was reveling in all that abandon, as Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers were singing when most of that malaise was penned to paper.

That was several years ago. I knew at the time I should destroy them, but not before I salvaging one or two brilliant snippets for a novel or a morsel of insight for an essay. Alas, that’s as big a lie to myself as the one that (name redacted) and I could make it a couple if he would just let down his defenses and allow me to love him.

(I threw up in my mouth a little, just remembering that I once wrote that.)

Their sheer volume assigned them a false significance. I’ve worried about that, again not because I’m preoccupied with death, but because I’d hate for them to stand as a definitive collection for future generations trying to capture the essence of crazy Auntie Beth for the family genealogy.

They were just, simply, a slice of angst.

Before the opportunity came up to burn them, right after I spilled all that blood, I told a trusted friend Katherine that if the cat ever achieved success in her plot to do me in, she could find the journals in the little trunk with the elephants on it. I also told her she should snatch them from my sisters’ hands if they got there before she did.

I love my sisters. But I don’t trust them not to read these journals that were not written to be read. I’d probably read their journals if they were left in my path. But they wouldn’t understand, because they still don’t buy my explanation that Total Strangers were a band, and they should un-purse their lips over the T-shirt reading “I got it on with Total Strangers.”

It’s as we used to say, found on Page 23, Volume 3, “The Dalbey Years”:

“If you have to ask the question, you won’t understand the answer.”

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