What remains when we leave: On words as waste matter

I’ve always collected notebooks. I’ve always written. Cupboards, shelves and storage boxes are full of my debris. When moving stacks of these old notebooks into my writing shed, I wondered, why do I continue to hold on to them? And then, I hope nobody ever has to go through them. I should discard them lest when I go, they add to the mound of waste of what remains.

I started writing garbled nonsense when I was around five years old, “pretend reading” my own books and the hard backed travel fiction my Dad loved so much (and which I couldn’t actually read), while imitating the sound of someone reading aloud, then placing random and indecipherable letters together on a page and asking my Dad to tell me what word I’d magicked up.

I continue to play in the field of garbled nonsense still, 40 odd years later, when it comes to the words I write for the sake of freeing my mind of thoughts by spilling them into private pages that aren’t intended for anyone else’s eyes, maybe not even a repeat viewing by my own.

Because this kind of writing, the kind that’s personal and vulnerable, occasionally rageful and raw, often messy and confused, is done for the purpose of freeing space in my heart and mind from the things I might otherwise keep stored inside, where they otherwise swill around unprocessed, getting subconsciously in the way.

Freeing the mind to find what matters

It's not the kind of composed writing to which I am also committed in my professional occupation as an editor, teacher and communications specialist. The latter is more of a craft, that necessarily asks for careful consideration, artful moderation, selective amplification, editorial precision, measured succinctness, refined skill and more besides.

No, this, which you might know as confessional writing, journaling, free writing, free association, or as I call it (after the teachers that I’ve learned and practiced with), is reflective or contemplative writing. This kind of writing embraces imperfection, mess, untidiness; it welcomes indecipherability, incoherence; because the point and the practice is to let go completely – of control, of order, of the mind’s conditioned impulse to make meaning and sense.

Instead, it’s a way of fumbling through, like cleansing the pallet, clearing the garden of weeds, tending to a compost patch, playing around in the muck and the mire.

There is a connection between the two though – crafting requires creativity as much as care, and so one does inform the other, in many ways. One of which is to clear the clutter and make space in my mind. The other is to get out of my own way when it comes to the crafting, because if we craft from a place of restriction and rigidity – writing what we think we should - we’re less likely to say what we mean or feel what we say.

In all forms of (written) expression and creativity, being loose and free is key, as it pertains to the kind of writing that is honest, trustworthy, intriguing, curious, and interesting (as opposed to the transactional nature of anything that is out to lure you with an agenda, although I must say I’ve written a bit of that though I like to think with integrity, when it comes to storytelling as a marketing and PR approach).

Private pages

I remember when my sister found one of my notebooks when we used to share a bedroom as children. I must have been about seven, she would have been 11. The notebook was black and white striped with a graphic of a man in a yellow suit and wide brimmed hat covering his face on the cover – very 1980s.  It didn’t have a lock on it. After this incident, I insisted on buying diaries with locks and keys. I've ripped apart and destroyed several since.

I can’t remember what my sister discovered in there, but I do remember the shame and humiliation of exposure after she told my Mum, which resulted in some kind of conversation that I’ve clearly chosen to forget.

Those words weren’t meant for anyone else, they were solely for me to process what I couldn’t express in any other way and what I didn’t wish anyone else to know. We are allowed our secret places, or at least we should be. Alas, children are beasts and families want to know everything. But that’s another story.

Ashes to ashes

I’ve been thinking about death and all the debris that will remain of my life. Specifically, how I don’t want someone to have to inherit my clutter, and how I might need to tell my partner and anyone I know to burn my notebooks when I’m gone.

Spoiler alert coming up about David Mitchell’s One Day and the recent film of the same name. Even though I read the book years ago I had forgotten the scene where Dex is sitting in the room of the house in which he lives alone after Emma dies. He is surrounded by boxes of her things, no doubt her notebooks. I wondered, will he look at them, would she want him to? Will I want anyone to look at mine? No, not really, because what will they find – occasionally lucid ramblings amidst incoherent wrangling and whinging.

In one sense, maybe this would be a sobering and grounding reminder of the nature of life, the fact that these are the states between which we sway and that’s okay. Confusion and clarity, doubt and hope, fear and anxiety, joy and wonder. Although also, how tedious.

I’ve often wondered if an uncle of mine whose death hit me perhaps the hardest in my life yet, if he left any notebooks or diaries. He expressed himself in writing too. I wanted to know more about him and what he thought because I never had the chance to hear him tell me himself. All I have are the scraps of ideas I jotted into my own notebooks after seeing his words in cards, and in notes he wrote, presumably for his own sense and sanity, and pinned to his fridge. Why do I need more than what he left and which I found? Would he have wanted me to know more? Possibly not.

We all have to deal with our own baggage. Why leave a pile of it to someone else to add to theirs? Maybe the mystery of what we don't know is better than the reality of what it might hurt to find.

And so, I don’t want anyone to have the feeling of obligation or dread at what I leave behind. So, when I know I’m dying, if I have the chance of knowing before I do, I will compost my own waste. I would prefer to leave behind the memory of interactions and exchange. As Philip Larkin said:

“Don’t worry about posterity, what will survive of us is love.”