Rereading Old Diaries

what you find, and what to do with it

It usually happens during a move. A box, a notebook with a cracked spine, your own handwriting from a decade ago. You sit down on the floor meaning to glance at it and get up an hour later feeling something you don’t have a word for.

Part of it is cringe, and that’s allowed. The person in those pages was very sure about some things. But past the cringe is the part that keeps people on the floor: you find out what you’d forgotten, and it turns out to be nearly everything.

The ordinary entries are the good ones

The dramatic entries, the breakups and the big decisions, you already remembered. What stops you cold is the small stuff. The roommate’s cat. The song you played constantly. The Tuesday you wrote two lines about soup. Those are the days you’d lost completely, and reading them, you get the whole year back around them.

Thanks for building a simple yet profound tool to someone who thrives on the combo of nostalgia and growth.

Laura Lee, Khruangbin

That combination is the thing. The nostalgia is obvious. The growth is quieter: you see what you were worried about and know how it turned out. You notice the person you were being kind to, or hard on. You find out which of your old problems simply stopped being problems.

What to do with it

• Don’t edit it. The urge to annotate, correct, or tear out a page is strong. Leave it. The embarrassing parts are the honest record.
• Read it once, properly. Not in pieces. An afternoon with the whole thing is a different experience than ten minutes with a page.
• Keep the lines that stop you. Photograph the page, or type the sentence somewhere you’ll see it again. Most of a diary is scaffolding around twenty lines that matter.
• Put it back in the box. It doesn’t need to be on a shelf. It needs to be somewhere you’ll find it again in another ten years.

There’s a longer page on what to do with old journals if the box is a big one.

Keep the feeling going

The reason the old diary works is that you forgot it, and then it came back. Most of us stopped writing one because it asked for too much. Little Memory asks for one line a night, about fifteen seconds, and then does the rereading for you: it shows you what you wrote a week ago, a month ago, and on this date every year after. The soup Tuesday comes back on its own, without a move or a box.

Your memories come back

Write one line tonight and that’s your journaling for the day. Seven days on it turns up again, and after that it keeps turning up.

1. a week later
2. a month
3. three months
4. six months
5. a year
6. every year after

little memory now

Exactly 1 year ago

Walked the long way home for no reason.

Have it come to you at an hour you pick, or leave notifications off and find them waiting the next time you open the app.

If you’d like a few of the old lines in there too, you can jump to a past date in the app and add one. Not the whole notebook. Just the twenty that stopped you.

Little Memory has been running since 2011, it’s free to download, and it’s private by default. If the writing habit is what’s on your mind, there’s a page on getting back into journaling, and one on why the one line a day size is the one that lasts.