What will happen to my diaries when I die?

“This is my Auntie Amber,” my 21-year-old nephew told his new girlfriend when he introduced us a few months ago. “If you want to know anything about my life, she’s the person to ask.”

My nephew lives in Kent. I live in Scotland. We see him once or twice a year, at most. I have not — and I feel like it’s very important that I make this clear from the get-go — been stalking him, or otherwise obsessing over the events of his life to date. And, as it happens, he was wrong. I couldn’t tell you anything you wanted to know about his life — just what I was wearing for those parts of it I was present for, and who else was there at the time.

It would be true to say, however, that I am the person my extended family turns to when they want to remember what year it was that George got married, say, or whether Keith finally got kicked out of the house* in 2015 or 2016**.

(*Long story.)

(**December 29th, 2015.)

I can always be relied upon to know these things. It is, you could say, my Totally Useless Superpower (And also the reason I still get invited to family events, basically. Because, let’s face it, it’s not my sparkling personality or charisma, is it?), although the truth is, it’s actually a Very Ordinary and Not-At-All-Super Power in that I don’t just magically remember when things happened, and what the exact sequence of events was. It’s not some mysterious feat of memory: it’s just an entirely foreseeable consequence of the fact that I write everything down, and I always have.

I’ve been ruthlessly documenting my life since I was 11 years old, and was given a green velvet diary one Christmas, which I used to record the titles of all the novels about ponies I started but didn’t finish, plus that one time my classmates all followed me home, hitting me with rolled up umbrellas. (Also quite a bit about the time my parents bought a new three-piece suite, which I guess you’d have to have been there to appreciate as much as my 11-year-old self apparently did.)

I’ve been writing ever since: first in other versions of that green velvet diary, and later in rambling, password-protected Word documents which became Livejournal entries, which became my blog. I don’t think I’ve ever had a major life experience — or even a thought about a major life experience — without writing it down. Actually, until I had Max, and my writing time all but disappeared, I don’t think I’d even had a minor life experience without writing it down. Everything was documented. Everything was important.

(Side note: this is why I find it really hard to watch TV shows about the zombie apocalypse, say. Because I always sit there wondering why no one is bothering to write this shit down, and would it really kill them to just show someone doing a quick livestream, say, or SOMETHING to indicate that events were being thoroughly documented for future generations? WOULD IT, THOUGH?)

(Also: think of the memoir you could write if you were involved in an actual apocalypse. So much material. Writers block would cease to exist. Kindle pagereads would be through the roof.)

In most areas of my life, I’m a minimalist. At least three of the drawers in my bedroom cabinet are completely empty. I own only the makeup products I use every day. I have Marie Kondo’d my wardrobe to the point where I have literally nothing to wear.

When it comes to memories and documenting them, however, I’m an absolute maximalist, and my memories are now stored across a selection of:

Paper diaries.

Digital diaries.

My blog.

Dozens of notebooks I’m not sure what to do with once I’ve used them up.

That huge wooden chest in my bedroom that I rarely open, but when I do it’s filled with photos of people I barely remember, birthday cards I couldn’t bring myself to throw away, and random corks from long-forgotten bottles of champagne.

Max’s baby box.

Numerous hard drives filled with photos.

Google Photos.

iCloud Photos.

A couple of large boxes filled with ACTUAL photos, from back when having actual photos was a thing.

Photo books, which I create for each year, but don’t actually order because I can’t afford them.

All of which is fine, of course (And I’m guessing pretty normal, really, with the possible exception of all the stuff about ponies), until every so often when I’ll jolt awake at 3am and think, “Hey, I wonder what will happen to my diaries when I die?”

And then another, even worse, thought:

Who am I doing this for, anyway? Who will care that I ate a pink frosted donut at an outdoor cafe in May of 2016, or once lived next door to an International Man of Mystery? And, further down the line, once I’m no longer here, who’ll even care about the bigger things: the births and deaths and marriages and kidney transplants, and all of the other things that mattered so much to me, but which will mean nothing at all to my great-great-grandchildren?

Who did I write those diaries for? And what will happen to them when I’m gone?

Because my blog is one thing, and it’s a thing that was written to be read. But my diaries are quite another; and while some of them begin with cringey, self-confident statements about how they’re being left for my descendants, so that someone can finally understaaaaannnnnd me, the truth is that I would LITERALLY DIE if anyone actually READ them.

Literally. Die.

(I mean, other than the extracts from them I’ve published myself, obviously.)

These thoughts came to a head a couple of weeks ago when I was reading a thread on Mumsnet of all places (Bear with me here, it was a good one…) in which a woman was attempting to workshop what she should do with her own embarrassing diaries. The general consensus was that all diaries should be burned, or otherwise destroyed: ideally sooner rather than later, because what if the writer is run over by a bus before she has a chance to get rid of the evidence? It could happen. And even if you’d left the diaries carefully packaged up, with a note on top asking whoever found them to BURN WITHOUT READING, there’s no guarantee they’d actually DO that — and we know this, because several people posted on the thread confirming that, yes, they would totally read someone’s diary if they found it, even if it was marked “private”.

Especially if it was marked “private”.

So, the diaries should be destroyed, right? I was on board with that. I even threw some of mine in the recycling bin during the first lockdown, because I was convinced I’d die of Covid, and I didn’t want my loved-ones to have to read my detailed thoughts about that guy Craig who I thought was maybe going to ask me out in high school, but who ultimately didn’t. Then I spent a few weeks worrying that the diaries might have fallen out of the bin while it was being emptied, and now the binmen would have them and be, I don’t know, planning to serialize them, or bribe me over them or something.

But they did not.

Those diaries were gone. They were not coming back to haunt me. (Unless, of course, at some point Netflix release a limited series about a young, red haired girl and a boy called Craig who may or may not have secretly wanted to ask her out, in which case, Ima need a lawyer…) And I had every intention of throwing the rest of them into the recycling bin to join them, but I decided to just have a quick flick through one of them first, and and I came across this long, rambling story about the time my best friend from uni came to Edinburgh with her boyfriend, and we stayed in a hotel and ordered a lot of champagne, and then she decided I’d insulted her boobs, so she ran off and left me with the bill. I mean, it’s not the most interesting story, I’ll give you that. But here’s the thing:

Until I read that diary entry, I had completely forgotten this ever happened.

As I read it, it started to come back to me, but if I hadn’t written it down in diary form, there’s a very good chance I would never have thought about that incident ever again. It would be like it never happened. I’d have gone to my grave without ever remembering that one time I compared our friendship group to the 60s pop band Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mitch and Tich, and ended up having to check out of a hotel and get the train home at 6am in the morning.

And, I mean, SO WHAT? Why would I need to remember that? WHO CARES, AMBER?

I mean, I guess I do?

For reasons that don’t really make sense, but which nevertheless exist?

Because once I’d thought about The ‘Tich’ Incident, and how it had almost been lost to the mists of time, I started thinking about all the other things that are in those diaries, and how, if I got rid of them, it would be like none of THOSE things happened either.

Would it be a tragedy to no longer remember that on the eve of my 23rd birthday I went for a drink with a guy called Dave from work, whose face I can no longer recall? Or that in August 1990 I saw “a nice pair of flared jeans” in MAKRO, but my parents wouldn’t buy them for me?

Probably not. But also yes.

Because imagine living your life, and having all of these experiences, and them ultimately not mattering. Imagine that all of the things you do today will one day be totally forgotten, even by you. Think about the person you once were, having all of these incredibly strong emotions (And, okay, also the less strong ones about the flared jeans), and you not even remembering them. Imagine if she knew you would do that. It would be like turning your back on her. Something not quite a betrayal, but somewhere in the same postal area, at least.

I suspect I’m being ridiculous about this. Somehow, though, I still can’t quite bring myself to let those diaries go (Although if and when I do, I will most certainly sing a few bars of Let It Go from Frozen, so at least that’s something to look forward to.) and accept that from that point on, there will be parts of my personal history that will be lost to me forever.

But then I think about that bus that might hit me at any moment, and I want to throw the diaries away immediately, then spend the rest of my life regretting it.

With the teen diary I published on my Patreon, I went through it and transcribed the entries I wanted to keep, before binning it, so I still had the mEmOrIeS, but didn’t have to worry about the bus. Maybe I should do that with the the rest of them. Maybe I should start a Substack. But then, it’s such a long and laborious process to transcribe them all, and it would be just like me to die in the middle of it, and end up leaving it all behind anyway, so, yeah. I have no solution.

Do you? Because I would really like to know what it is, if so. Do you have embarrassing old diaries stashed away somewhere, too? Do you ever wonder what will happen to them when you die? Or are you, you know, normal?

TBC. I guess…