By Yaldaz Sadakova
I shoved my journals, all 25 of them, in a shopping paper bag and took them to my building’s garbage room.
Parting with my diaries wasn’t going to be a ritual—no burning of candles or incense, no affirmations, no letter to my future self. There was no time for rituals or even for a quick goodbye. Discarding my journals was being reduced to a hurried chore because I had to finish packing for my move to Europe and there was still a lot to do.
I pressed the recycling button and tossed the notebooks down the chute, one by one. I expected to be sad, but instead I felt numb as I watched each notebook descend with a thud into the metal intestines of my condo building’s garbage system.
It took only a few minutes to destroy 13 years’ worth of journaling. My entire life’s diaries.
Pen Pals
Technically, the first time I journaled was more than 20 years ago, when I was in ninth grade.
That year, a young Peace Corps volunteer, S, was appointed as our English-language teacher. Her Americanness gave her a celebrity status in our sleepy Bulgarian town, population 20,000.
Sevlievo may have been cut off from the rest of the world, tucked in a valley, but we did have two national TV channels (първа и втора програма) which broadcast Hollywood movies and American sitcoms dubbed in English.
We reveredAmerican culture. Communism had collapsed just a few years ago; the country was ravaged by hyperinflation, poverty, corruption and political chaos. In this vulnerable state, we were susceptible to capitalism’s promises of abundance and freedom, as exemplified by America.
During the first week of classes, S brought a stack of blank notebooks.
“These are going to be your journals,” she said as she walked around the classroom, handing each student a notebook. “You can write about anything.”
We could write in the journals as often as we wanted—once a week, once a month or once every couple of months—and it wouldn’t count towards our grade. Even if we barely wrote in them, she wouldn’t hold that against us. The goal, she explained, was to practice our English in an unstructured way, without any pressure.
The idea of journaling seemed odd and indulgent. I didn’t know anybody who kept a diary. When you worry about whether you have enough money for your daily bread or your electricity bills during the winter, recording your experiences is not top of mind.
But I was intrigued by the novelty of keeping a diary. And when I started writing in mine, it was like a dam bursting. Until then, nobody had asked about my opinion on anything, but suddenly I had so many things to say about all kinds of things. Democracy, feminism, human rights, domestic violence, animal rights, climate change, environmental protection, journalism, literature, art.
It felt surreal that I could articulate complex views on these issues in English. I had never thought much about those things in Bulgarian, but I was now turning into someone capable of expressing herself. It was a moment of political awakening.
The great thing about these journals was that S responded with her own entry every time. I always looked forward to her replies. First, I would read what she wrote greedily and quickly. Then I would reread the entry slowly, absorbing every word, examining the curves of her handwriting, fascinated by the smoothness of her gel pen, a luxury in 1990s Bulgaria.
I learned through the entries of S that she was from the Boston area, but she’d also lived in New York City and she’d worked in media. So, to me, she embodied not just America, but also New York and journalism. Her responses gave me a glimpse into a magical world which until then I had only seen on TV.
Inspired by her stories about New York and journalism, I started picturing myself in that world: walking along the breathtaking streets of Manhattan, writing for a magazine, living in the center of the universe. It didn’t feel foreign at all.
To me, S also personified idealism. In her entries, I could see a reflection of my own progressive yearnings to make the world a better place. She was ahead of me on the path, an example of how to back one’s dreams to do good with concrete action. Even though she came from somewhere else, in many ways she felt more of a kindred spirit than people around me.
Throughout our correspondence, I never perceived S as a teacher. The type of teacher I was used to in bleak post-communist Bulgaria was the disciplinarian who forced us to memorize things and regurgitate stuff.
S cared about none of that. For her classes, there was nothing to memorize, no tests to cram for. The emphasis was on reading books in English, expressing our ideas in writing, crafting arguments and debating, using our imagination.
S felt more like a cool older friend. She was in her early 20s, after all, and her casual pants and sweaters made her even more approachable, setting her further apart from the other teachers, who sported suits.
I was desperate to emulate her. The only way I could do so was through imitating her writing style and her handwriting, which was much neater than mine and with fewer flourishes.
After two years, S’s Peace Corps contract ended and she left Bulgaria. I stopped journaling. There was no point anymore. There was going to be no reader, no correspondent, no response, no encouragement. It felt lonely, the idea of recording my thoughts in a notebook.
I put away the tall stack of journals I had accumulated over the course of two years. Stashed in a cabinet, the notebooks would hopefully make the absence of my pen pal less noticeable.
Two years later, before I left home for college, I scooped up the journals and took them to the dumpster near our apartment building.
I tossed them into the giant metal trash bin, where they landed on putrid mountains of vegetable peelings, plastic bottles, yogurt containers and all the detritus of daily life in 1990s Bulgaria. There was no recycling in the country back then.
It was an impulse decision. I was going through a phase of purging. I wanted to erase all previous versions of me. They were flawed and cringy. I was convinced I would never want to see reminders of them.
Now I regret discarding those journals. Not only did I lose the writing of my high school self, I lost the responses of S, too. She gave me a gift and I threw it away.
Morning Pages
Years after parting with S’s journals—after I had made it to New York, worked there as a journalist and left the Big Apple—I moved to Toronto.
During a bookstore visit, I discovered Julia Cameron’s self-help classic about creative recovery, The Artist’s Way. It piqued my curiosity because I had just started drafting my first book.
One of the key creative tools Cameron recommends in The Artist’s Way are morning pages—three pages of stream of consciousness writing done first thing in the morning. You can write about anything. Nothing is too insignificant or too petty. These pages are not intended for anyone to read.
I bought a notebook and started journaling. It felt liberating to let the words flow again, after a gap of more than a decade. As the pages accumulated day after day, I realized that I would have benefited greatly from journaling during my turbulent New York years, and later during my stint in Brussels, two intense periods when I faced shocks and crises I was ill prepared for.
Since then, I’ve been doing morning pages daily, except that I don’t do them in the morning. I write whenever I have time, but the earlier in the day, the better.
My writing is mostly stream of consciousness, with little clarification or context. My diary confidant is omniscient. I don’t need to explain myself to her, which is a relief because I overexplain in real life.
I journal by hand. I refuse to do it on my computer or, horror of horrors, on my phone. I shudder to think that writing by hand is a vanishing art. There’s something crucial about the physicality of the act, about my thoughts filling the blank page and morphing into a thing I can touch and see. And later destroy.
When I skip a day or more of journaling, my insides start to feel stagnant, but also agitated and restless. Stuff that needs digestion and excretion becomes logjammed. As soon as I get to the page again, things resume their natural flow.
Cubist Self-Portrait
After throwing away my Toronto journals in the garbage chute, I walked back to my apartment. It finally hit me what I had just done.
I told myself that being a nomad is an exercise in detachment and letting go. There was little solace in that.
I had wanted to keep my journals because I needed the comfort of having them with me. I liked having the option of rereading them, although I knew that I would likely never do that.
Over the years, I’d reread random pages from them, usually when reorganizing the cabinet where I stored them. It was always affirming to peek into the life of former me, to be transported, even for a few minutes, into the reality of this woman who was now a stranger to me.
As a rootless person who had rejected her upbringing and who had never taken much interest in her family tree, I found it reassuring to see that I did have a foundation, one built from my own experiences and words. I hadn’t come into the present moment from nothingness, after all.
Nevertheless, rereading my journals always felt tedious. After going through one or two entries, I would invariably get tired and put the notebooks away.
The other reason why I had wanted to keep my diaries was for the sake of memoir writing. What if I wanted to consult a journal for a personal essay I was working on? What if I had to check the veracity of something or simply get in touch with the version of myself that I was writing about?
However, memoir writing doesn’t require you to consult your existing journals—or to even journal in the first place. Journaling itself does help if you write memoir, because it’s a great way to process things and develop self-awareness. But I’d never consulted my journals when I wrote personal essays. I just never felt that need.
Despite that, my preference would have been to keep my diaries.
However, when I’d started packing for my European move a few days earlier, it became obvious that there was no room for them. I already had three suitcases and they would be full by the time I finished packing. I didn’t want to buy a fourth one. That new suitcase would cost around $100, maybe more. On top of that, the airline would charge me around $250 to take it with me.
But is the value of your journals just $350? I chided myself as I resumed my packing in the living room. You should have kept them. Losing your journals is losing who you are.
No, it isn’t, I countered. The person in the journals isn’t me. She’s fragments of me. At best, the journal entries are a cubistportrait of me. There’s no point in holding onto my past selves. They’re gone, dead.
I reminded myself that the content in these journals was just brain vomit, nothing more than a waste product. All written by an unreliable narrator. So much of the stuff in there was exaggerated and distorted, written in the heat of anger, at times of loss and grief. My journals were, after all, my place for processing emotions.
Primarily difficult ones. I don’t often dwell on the things that are going well in my life. My pages are mostly for metabolizing challenging things. So they can be dark, creating the impression to an uninitiated reader that my mind is a dark place.
There’s no such reader, thank god.
Actually, someone close to me did read my journals once. They said they wanted to understand me better because they didn’t know how to communicate with me, how to get to me.
My secret reader told me that they were blown away by the venom in my pages. “The whole thing is full of anger and resentment, cover to cover,” they said. Specifically, there was a lot of anger towards them, many criticisms of them.
They felt heartbroken that this was my true view of them. “You really think I’m a big baby. You really think the smallest things upset me.”
Except that this wasn’t my true view of them. It was one view—expressed in moments when I was livid with them.
Still, I felt like a monster, despite being angry for having my trust violated, for having my most private, most vulnerable self exposed. Did my reader now think of me as a Jekyll and Hyde figure? A nice enough person in real life, a monster on the page?
The monster on the page is indeed me, but she’s a highly concentrated version of just one facet of me.
The monster is the anger in me. Mine is the slow burn kind of anger. I don’t explode in daily life. I don’t have a temper. When I feel anger, my instinct is to force it back inside or to be passive-aggressive. And to turn to the page. There, I can say anything I want, without worrying about sounding hurtful, about saying something I can’t take back.
I’m still learning how to express my anger and frustration outside the journal in a way that is respectful. It’s one of the hardest skills for me. This is why my journal is the safe space where I say things unfiltered. It’s how I try to avoid causing harm.
Unless someone purposely goes in there and gets hurt by what they see.
Me and my reader managed to patch things up. They forgave me for the things I had written, after I explained the context behind those entries, even though they acknowledged that I had the right to write whatever I want. I forgave them for violating my trust and privacy.
Karma Yoga
Soon after I started drafting this essay, I pulled a tarot card. I needed a metaphor to give me visual inspiration. Ten of wands (which, for my astro friends, corresponds to Mars in Aries).
The card depicts a muscular, sturdy protagonist who is pushing a large, unwieldy bundle of 10 wands. His destination, a town, is in front of him, but he can’t see that because the wands are blocking his view.
The protagonist is a writer and each wand represents a year of his career. For 10 years, he has been working on his craft—writing novels, poems, short stories and essays.
He has reached a milestone. But he can’t recognize the progress he’s made because most of his work remains unpublished. All the gatekeepers he has pitched it to have said “no.” He has collected hundreds of rejections.
He has taken every single one in stride. He’s gotten used to gatekeepers not appreciating the value of his work. He’s gotten used to them not understanding his vision because his ideas are too idealistic, socialist and thus contrarian; his minority characters are too unrelatable to mainstream audiences; his projects are too niche to appeal to large swaths of the public.
He may be used to the rejections, but they still hurt. He’s at a point where he’s struggling with staying the course. He’s started to doubt himself. Maybe my work is crap. Maybe I haven’t mastered my craft. Maybe nobody cares about what I have to say. Maybe I’m wasting my time.
As a student of karma yoga, this writer needs to remember that he must keep going—he must keep producing and working on his craft—without looking for validation or accolades. He must remember that the act of making the art is the reward.
“As karma yogis, we are expected to do what is right and good, and then step aside without seeking any reward, any recognition, any gratitude,” says Swami Tyagananda in Walking the Walk: A Karma Yoga Manual.
“Our not seeking reward, recognition and gratitude doesn’t mean they won’t come. They well may and generally do. But if they don’t, as karma yogis we won’t care. The joy of consciously doing what is good and what is right is itself so abundant and powerful that it prevents us from being perturbed by indifference, neglect, even criticism.”
On his karma yoga journey, this writer needs to cultivate stamina. He needs to develop the ability to pause and self-soothe when things get rough and everyone keeps saying “no.” He needs to accept that, if needed, he can publish his work himself.
To use his rebellious energy effectively, to survive the blows that come with making art which is not commercial—blows like being ignored, misunderstood, ridiculed and excluded—he needs to connect with himself. He needs to access his intuition and wisdom. Trust his own insights. Know and master his mind.
That’s where journaling comes in. It can reveal the true nature of his mind to him. The erratic, unreliable and illusory nature of many of his thoughts. His tendency to believe everything he thinks just because his thoughts have the solidity of facts. And his grasping for praise and approval when the going gets tough.
Journaling can show him the roadblocks he places in front of himself. And, just as importantly, it can reveal to him the roadblocks that systems and institutions place in front of him.
He can learn to distinguish between the two if he can just slow down, contemplate and listen to himself on the page. He can stop beating himself up for failures that are not his fault. He can take pride in self-publishing his work.
He can build endurance for the long haul. He can keep writing—not necessarily because the world needs his art, but because he cannot not use his creative energy.
Resisting the Dystopian Story
It’s been a couple of months since I threw away my diaries. I’m back to journaling and settling into my new life in Brussels.
As I rediscover this place where a different version of me used to live, as I try to work out my next steps in terms of career and creative writing, keeping a diary is one thing that makes this city a home for me again. It gives me a sense of continuity after the rupture that comes with migration.
It also gives me an outlet for the anger, desperation and cynicism I feel every time I learn more about what has changed here during my decade-long absence.
The continent I’m getting reacquainted with is now firmly in the grips of the far right.
Immigration restrictions, which were inhumane even a decade ago, have become more stringent and cruel. The rights of immigrants have become more conditional.
I was horrified to discover that in Sweden, you can now lose your residency permit for bad behavior. The authorities are free to determine what amounts to bad behavior. According to media reports, that could include not paying off your debts, doing undeclared work or having ties to extremist organizations, but at the end of the day, “bad behavior” is a vague and subjective double standard, a cart blanche that can be used to push out anyone you don’t like. Which I guess was the real intent.
Then there’s remigration. Its proponents advocate for deporting all non-white immigrants and people of immigrant background, including citizens. Ethnic cleansing, in other words. Yet, this idea has started to worm their way into the mainstream.
Europe has turned into a dystopia.
This achievement would have never happened without the help of our friends in mainstream media, who have consistently portrayed migrants as a burden and a threat.
Time and again, they have provided great visibility to far-right figures and their destructive ideologies, whether inadvertently or not.
A recent Der Spiegel cover story called Ulrich Siegmund, AfD’s leader in the Saxony-Anhalt state, Germany’s most dangerous man. This boosted Siegmund’s popularity. Him and his supporters welcomed the cover story as free press, buying up copies of the magazine. Soon after that, in early September 2026, the AfD scored an election victory in Saxony-Anhalt.
Mainstream media has done another unforgivable thing to help usher in the far right. It has failed to identify corporate capture and the commodification of literally everything as the root cause of unaffordable housing, low wages, unemployment, erosion of public services, extreme weather and other legitimate concerns people across the political spectrum have raised.
News outlets have consistently failed to inform disaffected audiences that the true reason for their hardship aren’t foreigners, but corporate and Big Tech execs.
I’ve often wondered what would happen if all the hatred and anger towards immigrants was instead directed towards the actual individuals and institutions who have created the oppressive conditions and structures we live in.
As I try to figure out how to exist and resist in this dystopian narrative, my journals are all the more important to me.
This is especially the case in the age of AI, another disturbing layer of our dystopian reality which tech bros with far-right authoritarian fantasies are pushing on us in every aspect of our lives without our consent. At a time when I’m urged to outsource my cognitive and creative abilities, when I’m told that writing is worthless as a profession or an avocation, when I’m advised to reduce myself to a sentient dispenser of prompts, I’m sticking to my paper journals.
Whether I will keep them or not is another story. ♦
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