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When the flooding after Hurricane Katrina inundated Amanda Bonam’s neighborhood in New Orleans East, it swept away countless concrete memories of their childhood. Bonam, who was 10 years old during Katrina, recorded those memories in journals that were destroyed by the flood. They would write in spiral notebooks “when times were hard, or especially joyful.”

“And because I don’t have them anymore,” they said, “I have to imagine, you know, the sorts of things that were going in there.”

Despite losing the journals, Bonam kept journaling and has even deepened the practice in their adulthood. They learned from their experience losing their journals during Katrina to keep records that can easily be thrown into a bag if they need to evacuate.

Still, there are traces of their childhood that might’ve helped them understand the roots of their identity and personality that are lost forever.


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