The Truth, The Whole Truth

Every personal journal I've ever written is in a drawer in my bedroom.

As you might expect, they record events, musings and dreams beginning back in my days as a 12 year-old eighth grader. The volumes go forward from there to the present day.

I intensely dislike the earliest journals and have come close to burning up anything I wrote between the 12 and the age of 20. Trust me, I've had the barbecue grill fired up and a can of lighter fluid ready.

At the last minute, I found I could not burn them. So I doused the flames with the garden hose and watched the wisps of smoke disappear into the haze of Los Angeles. I returned the journals to their drawer.

I don't know why I keep them. Indeed, I rarely crack open the pages of these journals, not even for a nostalgic laugh.

They are the thoughts of a stranger. And when I do pick them up, the words don't make me smile. My journal entries are both disturbing and heartbreaking to me. Even with all the events, wishes and regrets recorded on the page, what always strikes me is how much goes unsaid.

I am unequivocably dishonest in them. Even with myself, I could not commit to paper the true thoughts I had about most things in my life. Everything is veiled, like I was attempting to win a spot in a coded document contest. I don't have the best memory so when I pick up those earliest journals, sometimes I can't even figure out what I was actually doing, thinking and feeling.

However, there were those rare moments when I wrote down what was real. They are easy to identify because I would later go back and black out the words, first with a ball point pen and then with a sharpie.

When I leaf through my journals, there are entire sections that are blacked out. Clearly, I wanted there to be no accidental readings of my thoughts.

Of course, the easiest solution would have been to not write at all. But you might as well ask a bird to cease it's song. I've been writing in one form or another since I was five. How could I stop?

And so black marks streak the pages.

Paranoia? Possibly. But I was under no illusions either. I was too consumed with the fear that someone would pick my journals up, read them and suddenly realize I was not precisely who they thought I was.

I was afraid I would disappoint. Then they would no longer like me. No longer love me. And they might find a way to use my true thoughts and reflections to somehow hurt me.

A couple of months ago a friend asked me at what point in my life I finally became my true self. It is obvious from my journals that as a 21 year-old living in China, I stopped blacking out what I wrote down.

When I leaf through those first, cross-out free journals, I get a chuckle from the occasional disclaimer I threw in for any possible nosy readers. In one journal, I wrote at the very beginning, "If you're reading this and you're not me, how do you know I'm telling the truth?"

I really thought I was clever with that one, didn't I?

Throughout my twenties, the disclaimers disappear until all that remains is the unvarnished truth. But it was often a truth that only lived on paper.

As I get older, I find it's no longer enough to merely write my true self and then live a facade of that truth. No, I have be fully myself whether on paper or in person.

But it's not easy to be 100% honest with yourself, is it?.

And so perhaps I keep those journals in the drawer with their blacked out words as a reminder of an existence that truly was not living. A reminder to never let myself go back to a place that bleeds darkness and secrets.

A reminder to tell the truth.