Looking backwards in order to go forwards

AINE O’CONNOR I

WAS an avid journal keeper for decades. Notebooks and notebooks were filled with feelings and thoughts then dispatched to boxes. Then a few years ago I burned them all. Having had a reread I realised that they were journals of pain, I wrote to sort out unhappiness or confusion, I said the things on paper that I couldn’t say out loud. I wasn’t always unhappy, but I did mostly write the journals when I was in a bad space, not when I was in a good one, so it seemed like I was always unhappy. I didn’t want people, ie my children, to find them after I had popped my clogs, read them without me around to add a drop of context, and think, “Wow, what a miserable creature our mother was”. So I burned them.

My logic too was that there was no good to come from remembered pain. Who wants a mausoleum of misery? Every now and again though I do find escaped bits of mopey musing and they’re not without interest. Memories are lovely but in general I prefer to look forward rather than back, what’s done is done and all that. However, sometimes when you’re feeling overwhelmed or like there is a lot of road ahead, looking back can be a reminder of how far you’ve come.

One of my escaped mopey musings was from an imminent new year. Because I felt I had achieved little since the previous new year, or many of the ones before that, it felt like a marker of the undone. I was 43 and feeling worn out and old. This looming year I turn 50, allegedly. Fifty? It feels freaky because it’s 50 but also, because I did make some of the changes I had hoped, I feel far younger than I did six years ago. I have much yet to do and the belief that I will do it, eventually, for the new year is no longer a marker of the undone.