How I Turned My 35-Year-Old Journals Into a Memoir

When it comes to honest, reflective first-person writing, there’s nothing more valuable than your own in-the-moment thoughts.

Keeping a journal means writing down vulnerable insights about yourself. This practice is often accompanied by fear. Fear that you will open up painful things you’ve been avoiding. Fear that someone else might violate your privacy and read your sacred ponderings. Or fear that when you die, someone will find and publish your journals, then turn your life story into a blockbuster hit, showcasing your most embarrassing and humiliating reactions to life. (OK, maybe some of us secretly want that posthumous movie part to happen.) Yet despite all these things to fear, maintaining a personal journal is such a vital process because you discover and re-discover aspects — many often hidden, even from you — about yourself. By keeping a journal, you can return to and refresh your memories. Journaling becomes a personal archive that — if organized in a productive way — can be incredibly helpful for memoir writers.

Thirty-five years had elapsed when I came across my journals from my days in the milit…