Last Sunday afternoon, my husband was out in the garage, and the house was still. I sat down on the edge of our bed and opened the bottom drawer of my dresser.
Under my winter sweaters, there’s a stack of notebooks. Spiral ones, a few with flowered covers, and one with a broken lock that never worked anyway.
They’re my diaries from my 30s and 40s. Next to them is a bundle of letters I wrote and never sent, and a few that friends wrote to me when their lives were falling apart.
Nobody has read them but me. And for years, I didn’t want to think about who might read them next.
So this fall, I finally decided what to do with them. Not because I’m going anywhere soon. Because these are my private things, and I want to be the one who chooses what happens to them.
If you’ve been wondering what to do with old diaries and private letters, this is how I sorted mine, and what I learned along the way.
The Drawer Only I Open
I started keeping a diary when our kids were small. It was the only place I could say how tired I was.
Some pages are sweet. There’s the day my youngest said “pasketti” for the first time, and the morning we found out about our first grandchild.
But a lot of pages are hard to read now. Money worries, long winters, and things I wrote when I was angry and never said out loud. (My husband comes off as a saint in most of it, which is fair.)