On Wasted Words

Pages upon pages of ideas long since cultivated or outgrown are, in a utterly brief moment, relived and remembered. Rediscovering the books from a bygone era of one’s prior holy, personal exhalations present the author with a peculiar presence. A demoralizing air of embarrassment and nostalgia waft inward and a devastating reality is realized. At once one either wonders why they had devoted scarce time from their lives to capturing emotions or impressionistic summaries of a particular day, or wonders how trivial those memories really are.
The question of why this or that experience was important then and not now is confounding and ever present upon rediscovering past journals. Perhaps the most humbling aspect of the entire ordeal is that one may come to the realization that maturity and older age has failed to bring about emotional growth, as one had previously thought. It could be that one realizes how unimportant events are now, whereas in the past, they were historic and unique to the author. Perhaps one now understands how petty it was to burn the bridges of budding friendships over such trivial affairs. There was a time, where what is now apparently cringe worthy poetry or an innocent pronouncement of love, was unabridged insight to adolescent intrigue and youthful confusion. The time where one, at a young age, rode their bike unknowingly through freshly laid cement and was accosted by construction workers so volubly that, to this day, home tasks are frightening seems, somehow, less damaging. Reliving these journals is a tough task to tackle. One becomes aware as to the uselessness of the entire ordeal. If the emotions that were strong enough then that they required to be cataloged cease being as powerful now, then why were written only to be forgotten soon after. It seems to be that if the author of these journals is going to forget whatever compelling insight they wrote in journals and notebooks soon after writing them and without an audience reading them, it beckons to be wondering as to why would anyone wast the time to recored those personal parables.
It could be that the notebooks and journals serve as a therapeutic outlet, however if one suffers the misfortune of having their personal therapy read by unwelcome and unwarranted eyes, one may have to invest in actual therapy to cure the inevitable damage and mental scaring. Why risk it? Keeping a journal may not be worth the effort and there may not be a equal reward for the effort required to do so. Once written down the emotion or thought is often forgotten and only returns to the author upon reviewing these entries at a future date, when the emotion has ceased to matter. Yet innumerable people still write down their daily exploits and personal insights down for no apparent reason except to release them from their mind. One has to wonder whether, without an audience in mind, is keeping a journal necessary at all? Perhaps to cleanse the palate of the mind in order to store more memories and thoughts only to follow suit and be cataloged in the same journals years later. Mental recycling. If journals were written with an audience in mind perhaps the contents would not bring about such disdain and embarrassment to the author upon reading subpar writing if it were intended to be read by the eyes of others, or perhaps life’s events are really that generic and, at times, embarrassing. How unimportant we are when we view ourselves from a distance.