I bought a scanner this week, and I’ve begun scanning my journals into digital format.

I’ve been keeping diaries and journals since January 2, 1987, shortly after my 13th birthday. Earlier that year I’d read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, a British work of fiction in the form of a boy’s diary, and I decided I wanted to keep my own. For Hanukkah that year, my parents bought me a blank diary, and I’ve been writing down my thoughts ever since. Sometimes I go weeks or months without writing, and for a while my journal writing was replaced by some very intense blogging, but I’ve since returned to writing most of my stuff in my own private journal, and I’ve always held on to my journals. Lately I’ve decided I want to have backups, just in case something happens to the originals; also,  converting them to digital format will make it easier to skim through all of them someday. So I bought a scanner through Amazon and I’ve started scanning them.

I’ve already scanned everything up through the middle of my second year of college, and it’s been fun glancing at the pages and seeing how I’ve evolved as a person.

After the first couple of pages in my first diary, there are some pages missing. I tore them out a long, long time ago. They spanned most of 1987. In middle school, I wrote a lot about a crush I had on a classmate. A year or two later, I was ashamed of what I’d written, so I tore out the pages and threw them away. I regret throwing them out. I wish I still had those pages.

And there’s another page missing from my diary. I visited Israel when I was 18 years old, and in Jerusalem I planned to do what many people do: write a prayer on a piece of paper, roll it up, and stick it in a crack in the Western Wall. I decided that no piece of paper would be more sacred to me than a piece of paper from my own diary, so the night before we visited the Western Wall, I wrote a prayer on a blank page of my diary and tore it out.

If I remember correctly, my prayer was something like this: I don’t know what I want in life, so please, God, just let me be happy. The biggest issue in my life at the time was that I was totally confused by my sexuality, and I had no idea how I wanted it to be resolved. I figured if I asked for some specific outcome, it might not be what I wanted. You know those stories where someone asks a genie for a wish, and the wish turns out to be not at all what the person wanted? Well, I figured I would work the system. When you wish for something, you’re really saying, “Please — if you grant me this wish, I will be happy.” So I decided to cut out the intermediate steps and just ask for happiness. Since I had no idea what would make me happy, I decided to leave it up to a higher power.

I don’t believe in God anymore. And I can’t say that I’ve found true happiness. Maybe human beings aren’t meant to be truly happy, or maybe something in my makeup just keeps me from it. I’m not depressed; I’m just constantly yearning for something I don’t have. And if I ever get what I hope for, I worry that I’ll just wind up wanting something else.

I sometimes wonder what will happen to all my diaries after I die. Oddly, I’ve always kind of thought that after I died, I would want my mother to keep them and read them. But of course, in the normal scheme of things, my parents will be long gone by the time I die. I don’t know if it’s that I can’t conceive of my living a long life, or that I can’t conceive of my parents dying, or – most likely – that I just really want my parents to get me.

But other than family, I can’t imagine who would ever want to read everything I’ve written. I’m not a significant person – I’m just an ordinary human being who will be forgotten after my death, just like everyone else. And I shouldn’t really care what happens to my diaries after I die, since there will no longer be a me to care about them.

Diaries serve two purposes that I can think of: (1) writing down your thoughts, and (2) reading your own thoughts several years after the fact in order to reminisce or keep track of your personal growth. What my diaries will mean to other people, I have no idea.

But at least by scanning them, I can preserve and maybe prolong their existence.