What should I do with my old journals?
Thuy
Old journals can feel sacred, embarrassing, heavy, or impossible to throw away. There is no right or wrong answer. It depends on the person, their circumstances, and what kind of relationship they want with those journals now.
Some people keep everything
Keeping old journals can be beautiful. They hold your history in your own handwriting: the person you were, what you survived, what you wanted, what mattered before you knew it mattered.
Some people discard them
Throwing away old journals can also be healthy. Not every version of you needs to stay in a box forever. If keeping the physical notebooks makes you feel watched, crowded, or stuck, letting them go may be its own kind of closure.
The middle path: scan first
The best of both worlds is to scan the entries you may want to revisit, then decide what to do with the physical copies. Scanning makes the archive easier to search, easier to carry, and less dependent on storage space.
How Unpack helps
Unpack can help you turn old handwritten entries into a searchable Archive with summaries, extracted text, tangents, and emotion tags. You can revisit the useful parts without rereading every notebook cover to cover, and then decide whether the paper itself still needs to stay.
Common questions
Is it okay to throw away old journals?
Yes. Some people keep them, some people destroy them, and some people scan them first. There is no right or wrong answer. The right choice is the one that fits your circumstances and protects your privacy, space, and emotional safety.
Can I scan old handwritten journals into Unpack?
Yes. Unpack is built around scanning handwritten journal entries so they can be summarized, organized into tangents, and revisited later.