Burning journals as a healing process

Today I burnt 15 journals. Journals I had written during months of a mania episode after going back on medications for bipolar 1 disorder two years ago. I was encouraged by my psychiatrist to journal rather than blurt out all my disjointed thoughts on Facebook. So I filled over 20 books, mostly school exercise books and scrapbooks with colourful scribblings, often in felt tip pen rather than biro.

​I had felt an extreme need to express myself at the time. I understood what I wrote, but it would have been complete nonsense to anyone else. Trauma was a recurring theme in amongst all the mind-maps, associations and symbolism. I was trying to process my trauma and calm my racing brain. Often my brain was racing too fast and was too disorganised to write, so I painted brightly coloured abstracts instead.

Burning dozens of pages from manic journals

In my last therapy session for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), my psychologist asked, 'what will help you let go of the pain and move on?' I said 'I don't know?' I've processed so much - expressed it, analysed it, even been creating something new from it (my work-in-progress novel and numerous paintings). My psychologist said I've done a lot of processing on my own. But sometimes I find it therapeutic to destroy what I've created. I knew that I would destroy my journals at some stage but today I decided it was time to destroy three-quarters of them.

It's a process I have done from time to time - delete photos, delete Facebook posts, delete blog posts. Even destroyed several symbolic objects during a mania episode. It was part of the processing and letting go.

I chose the most 'manic' journals - easily identified because of the large, scribbly writing in brightly coloured felt-tip pens and flicked through them, skim-reading portions for the last time (which wasn't easy because it was barely legible) before ripping out the pages and tossing them into the fire. I wrote a page full of notes about what the mania was like, going from my journal writings. 

It's not the first time I've burnt journals. When I had a breakdown when I was 20, I had a 'secret' journal of poetry - the only time I'd written poetry - it was an outlet for my suffering while I was being told I was 'demon-possessed' (back in the early nineties there wasn't much awareness about mental illness). I told someone about the journal and they told me to burn it to let go of the pain. Well, I still had a lot of other pain but I can't remember what was in the journal now. If it's destroyed, I can't go back to it and I'll forget about it. 

I wrote a memoir when I was hypomanic and published it under a pen name. But then I unpublished it and deleted it in a rather impulsive decision. That was because after a few people read it and told me they felt so sad, I didn't want a story that didn't inspire. But the process of writing it and then deleting it was therapeutic.

For the past few years, I've been writing a semi-autobiographical novel with a pet theme called Pet Purpose. I decided to go with a novel mainly to give me some 'privacy' while I tell a very personal story. So I've changed the story-line but woven some of my story in there. Sometimes I feel like deleting it, but I have worked so hard on it and it's a matter of getting it to a point where I feel comfortable sharing it publicly. It has been very emotional and therapeutic to write, but now it's at the 'hard work' stage of re-writing and editing so I don't think about it everyday now. But at one stage, thinking about it every day, gave me a sense of meaning and purpose.

It was a rather impulsive decision to destroy the journals, even though I knew I would burn them when I was ready. I still have half a dozen more, but they are when I was more stable, so it would take longer to read through them before they get destroyed too. Another time. 

How did I feel when I destroyed them? Earlier I'd had a migraine. It seemed to ease when I made a decision. I had a surge of energy (like hypomania) and felt purposeful. I did it quite quickly, writing a few notes (summarising 15 journals onto 1 page of notes about mania), then tearing out pages and tossing them onto a fire. I only kept 2 pages which had symbolic sketches on them.

During the burning process, I felt abdominal cramps building up. Immediately afterwards, I had a physical release on the toilet - the 'runs'. Quite often, I have had a physical release of some kind when I have 'let go' (eg crying, orgasm, laughing, diarrhoea, even seizures). I am hoping that I will have let go of a lot of that psychological pain poured out into those journals too. The pain that has kept me 'stuck' and stopped me from moving forwards.

Edit: a few hours later, I'm still feeling a lot lighter than I have in a long time. Like I've let go of a heavy burden (that has been in my dreams). It has felt like a transformative process to burn some intense writings. I intend to burn the other journals when I am ready. I'll skim through them to find any 'gems' first.