What to do with old journals

Keep them, and change how you read them back. Old journals are hard to reopen because they are kept by date, and memory does not ask for dates. It asks for people. Note who was in each entry and what it was part of, and your old journals stop being a pile of evenings and become a life archive you can walk around in.

None of this asks you to stop journaling or to write differently. It only asks what happens to the pages afterwards.

First, keep them

Whatever you decide later, do not decide in a hurry. A journal you throw away is gone for good, and the person who might most want to read it is you, twenty years from now.

• Paper journals: keep them somewhere dry and dark, away from sun and damp. If you worry about losing them, photograph the pages you love most. A phone camera is enough.
• Journals in an app: export them now, while the app still works and you still have the account. Most journal apps can export (Day One, Apple Journal and Diarium all can), and a file on your own drive outlasts any subscription.
• Private things: if there are pages no one else should ever read, keep them, but keep them somewhere only you can open. Privacy is a reason to lock a journal, not to lose it.

Why we stop reading what we wrote

Almost everyone who has journaled for years shares a small secret. They rarely read it back.

Part of it is practical. A journal kept by date grows into one long line, and the only way into it is to scroll or to flip, page after page, hoping to land on the right evening. Ten years of honest writing becomes something one writer called a graveyard of unsearchable text: everything is there, and almost nothing can be found.

Part of it is tender. Rereading an old journal means meeting a younger self, sometimes one who was struggling, and that can feel like opening a door you are not sure you want to walk through. It is easier to keep writing forward.

Both reasons are real, and both are gentle. Neither means the writing was wasted. It means the writing was kept in a drawer that only opens one way.

A day is the wrong drawer for a memory

The words themselves tell the story. Journal and diary both grow from the word for a day: the French jour, the Latin dies. They are made to hold one day at a time, and they do it beautifully.

But memory does not ask for days. It asks for people. When you miss someone, you do not think "I wonder what I wrote on the fourteenth of June." You think of them, and you want everything at once: the first time you met, the long phone call that winter, the last good afternoon. A journal filed only by date has to be read backwards through a hundred unrelated evenings to give you that.

The date is usually the least important thing about a memory. Who was there matters more. What it was part of matters more.

Gather them around people

So the most useful thing you can do with old journals is small. Ask two quiet questions of each entry. Who was in this? And, sometimes, what is this part of? A friendship. A move. A year of grief. A season of becoming a parent. Note the answer next to the entry, in whatever way your notebook or tool allows.

You do not need to do it all at once. Start with one person you miss, or one year you want back, and let the rest join slowly. Over months, those small notes turn a stack of evenings into something you can find your way through. Open a person, and their whole story with you is there in order. Open a chapter, and the year reads as a year.

For paper notebooks, a simple index at the back already does this: each person, and the pages they appear on. For journals in an app, bring them into one place that can hold people as well as dates.

Read them back by person, not by date

Once your writing is gathered this way, rereading changes. You no longer have to wade through every evening to find the one you want. You can choose what to visit.

• Read by person. On someone's birthday, read everything you have written with them. It is one of the kindest things you can do for a friendship, even if they never know.
• Read by chapter. At the end of a hard season, read it as a whole. Things that felt endless while you lived them often look like a story with a turning point.
• Read slowly, and be kind. The person who wrote those pages was doing their best with what they knew. You are allowed to love them, and to be glad you are no longer exactly them.

And if one day you want to hold them again, a gathered journal also makes a good book: how to turn your journal into a book.

Journaling vs a life archive

Journaling is good. Writing down a day slows the evening down and lays the swirl in your head flat on a page where you can look at it. A worry written down becomes a sentence, and a sentence is smaller than a worry. A life archive does not replace that. It is what the writing becomes afterwards.

• Journaling asks: what happened today, and how do I feel about it? A life archive asks: who was there, and what is this part of?
• Journaling is kept by the order of days. A life archive is kept by people, stories and chapters, with the days still inside them.
• Journaling is for the person writing tonight. A life archive is for the person reading in twenty years, who may well be you.
• Journaling's gift is clarity in the present. A life archive's gift is continuity: the sense that your life has threads, and that you can follow them.

They are not competing for the same space. One happens in the evening. The other quietly gathers what the evenings leave behind. Keep the ritual exactly as it is.

Common questions

Should I throw away my old journals?

Not in a hurry. Most people who regret it regret it years later, when they want a voice or a detail only those pages had. If keeping them feels heavy, keep them closed for a while instead. If some pages must never be read by anyone, keep them locked rather than destroyed, and decide again in a few years.

How do I digitize paper journals?

Photograph the pages with your phone, a notebook at a time or just the pages that matter. You do not need to type them up. In Ember, a photographed page goes into an entry like any photo, and Ember reads the text in it on your device, even handwriting, so a search for a word on the page finds it.

How do I move old journals out of Day One or Apple Journal?

Export them from the app, then import the file. Ember reads Day One's JSON export, Apple Journal's export and Diarium's backup, with dates, photos and places kept. The steps are in exporting your Day One journal and backing up, exporting or moving a journal.

Do I have to change how I write?

Not at all. Write in the same voice, at the same length, as often or as rarely as you already do. The only addition is noting who was there and, when it fits, what larger story an entry belongs to.

Is it strange to organise a journal around other people?

It can feel that way at first, since a journal is so personal. But most of what we feel is about someone: a friend, a parent, a partner, a child. Gathering your writing around them does not make it less yours. It makes it easier to see how much of your life was shared.

The day, and the thread

Journaling keeps the day. A life archive keeps the thread that runs through the days. You already have the harder part, the writing itself.

The rest is only a matter of keeping it close to the people it belongs to, so that one evening, years from now, you can open a name and find a whole life waiting there, exactly as you lived it.