My ex-wife maintained an anonymous online journal for 10 years. Actually, longer than that, but she deleted several years’ worth of entries at one point. Ten years is what remains online today. She had shared the address with me years ago, and allowed me to read it. Then at some point it became password-protected. I forgot about it, and along the way, reading her thoughts about the world became the last thing I wanted to do anyway.
I think it was making sure that some letters she’d sent to the kids were in a safe place that reminded me of its existence earlier this year, so I checked. The password protection had been removed, and there were almost-daily entries from 2002 to 2012, and then a single, one-sentence entry from last fall, a few months before she died, asking rhetorically why she had not kept it up.
The owner of the platform she used was kind enough to help me get her entries into a format that I could copy and save offline in a few different ways. The entries totaled 1,353,663 words and stretched over more than 3,000 single-spaced pages in a Word document.
I haven’t come close to reading it all, and am in no hurry to. But I thought that our kids might want to some day. There are entries about when she first met me, how she was hoping I’d ask her out, about first dates, first fights. My kids will be able to read some day about what their mom felt and thought when she first found out she was pregnant with them. Later entries detail the growing resentment she had toward me, disappointment, hatred. And throughout, the struggle with alcohol, eating disorders and the undercurrent of past trauma.
The closest the entries come to mentioning the hell she put other people through were references to “not remembering” what happened the night before, and vague lamentations about being a bad person. And some, based on too-vivid memories of my own about the same times, brazenly depict an alternate reality and set of facts.
Anyway, writing this kind of thing myself for the first time in my life reminded me again of its existence. And it’s interesting to think about how easy it is, maybe, to lie to yourself.
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