I have kept journals since I left home at 18, but I didn't start writing copiously until I entered therapy. Now I keep an art journal so there's pictures and words together, and I go through journals at a rapid pace. I think I'm in a stage where I have to get it all out over and over and over.

I don't go back to look at them very often, especially the older ones. I skimmed through the earliest ones after I was well into therapy and it broke my heart to see how much pain I was in, to see that I knew something was wrong, and to see how scared I was to trust anyone enough to get help. More than anything I feel empathy for the young woman I was and how scared I was. I didn't realize that, not when I was in it.

The most interesting thing I have found is proof of T's words that we learn and change in connection with one another. A lot of the realizations I have had in T, I see written in earlier journals (things like, I'm scared of trusting people; I've been traumatized; it was never about me) that never seemed to "stick" in my head until T and I went over and over them.

I think it's worth saving our work, even if we don't see any reason to right now. Ten years from now, Twenty years from now, maybe we will have a different perspective.