The other day I went over to the Diary-X site to write myself a journal entry there. I’ve been keeping my long-form journal there since December of 2001 (well, technically I hosted the pages on my own site for a while, but it soon became clear that it was a bit more hassle than I wanted to deal with, and a few months later I put everything on Diary-X). You can imagine my surprise when I saw a note stating that the Diary-X site suffered a massive drive failure, and the site owner isn’t sure the data can be recovered even with the very expensive recovery procedure he’s contracted out to have done.

My first reaction, as you might imagine, was something along the lines of, “Oh crap, that’s over 4 years of my life I’ve recorded there, probably lost forever!” After a minute or two, though, sensibility took over and reminded me that this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Or even the second or third time.

[Interlude and/or disclaimer: It's sad that tens of thousands of people might have lost their journal entries, but hey, this is my blog and so I'm going to just write about my stuff. It's not that I lack sympathy for others, necessarily, but this is my blog (and museum of personal frustration). Now, back to my blog posting.]

I’ve been journalling since I was about 8 years old - and yes, I started with those cute little diary books that you can buy at any grocery store, with the cute little locks and girly-girl covers. None of my earlier journal entries were anything worth keeping, mostly just which rock star I had a crush on and how horrible my relatives were. When I was 15-and-a-half, though, I decided to see if I couldn’t commit to a full year of writing in a journal every day. It was 1985, and I actually succeeded in my attempt. It was obvious the little store-bought journals wouldn’t work, and I didn’t have a computer (or even a typewriter!), so I got a big ol’ binder and a bunch of filler paper. By Dec. 31, 1985, I had a bit over 350 pages (both sides) of handwritten journal entries. I had a lot of firsts that year - first love, first time I got drunk, first time I smoked, first time I lost a best friend through my own stupidity, and a whole lot more. It truly was the sunset of my childhood, because a few days before the end of the year, I moved out from living with my mother and moved in with my first live-in boyfriend. I toyed with the idea of using that journal to write a book at some point (after I got some perspective on that year!), and figured that even if I didn’t, it would be a wonderful thing to have in the future, for many reasons.

In 1989, my then-husband and I split most acrimoniously, and the box containing that journal (along with all the journals I’d kept in the intervening years, as well as some other sentimental things) was stolen by him when I moved out. I pleaded with him to return it - and even requested the journals to be returned to me in our divorce paperwork. Of course, I never got any of it back. He knew how important that stuff was to me, how much I treasured it - and since he couldn’t hurt me through any other means, he trashed my keepsakes.

And there have been other occasions, in the years since, when things I’d written were destroyed or erased or deleted by others. A website discussion group that I’d become extremely involved with (hmm, I wonder if anyone from the old Yahoo Polyamory Group circa ‘00-’02 reads my blog?), and posted a lot of really great stuff to, all got deleted without warning when the group owner had some kind of personal crisis. Some love letters that I’d planned on saving forever got tossed out by mistake. I even still have a harddrive from my first computer, a Tandy 386, that had many text files saved on it (many of them my personal religious rituals and important to nobody but me), and I think the reason I hang onto it is because there’s still a slim chance I’ll get that information back. It’s almost like a talisman, a tangible representation of all the writings I’ve lost over the years.

But I haven’t lost those 3 years documented in the journal entries on my Diary-X journal. I’ve only lost what I wrote about them at the time…and while that writing is precious to me, it probably represents more of the bad than the good that was going on in my life at the time. After all, nearly 30 years of journalling has definitely helped me work out my problems in text, and that gets to be a habit. And a comfort. And, quite often, a very useful tool for self-improvement and progress in life.

But what I learned from it all is far more important than what I went through. I rarely went through old journal entries - unless I was looking for a specific event - due to the fact that the stuff I’d written at the time usually brought back plenty of unhappy memories, even after time had worn off the sharpest edges of the worst of it. Hell, I have over a decade’s worth of hardcopies of my poetry tucked away in a binder that I rarely read - not just because it’s not exactly Pulitzer calibre, but because most of it’s pretty sorrowful. (To give you some idea of how prolific I was, there are 19 poems, written between 1985-1988, about my first love and all the heartbreak therein. Nineteen, for crying out loud! I’m sure someone should be grateful that I haven’t written any poetry since 1997.) I just keep trying to remind myself, when I think about the writings I’ve lost, that what I learned is more important than what happened.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I’ve lost, in one way or another, so much in life is because I needed to learn to handle loss with more grace, more dignity, and more acceptance of what really matters most. I do have a firm belief that nothing happens for no reason…it’s just that a lot happens for no reason that anyone can necessarily figure out. I’m not so great at having faith in much of anything, but I have faith in that.