From time to time, I’ll look back through the personal journals I’ve scribbled in throughout my life, the keepers of my raw thoughts and emotions. The words poured forth after my dad died, when I went through a divorce, and after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. There are so many what-ifs scribbled on those pages.

Kotb describes her journals as an emotional archive—private “keepers” that preserve unfiltered reactions to major life ruptures: bereavement, divorce, and a breast-cancer diagnosis. Looking back, she confronts how grief and fear generate “what-ifs,” the mind’s counterfactual stories about how events might have unfolded differently. The quote highlights journaling as both witness and mirror: it records pain in the moment and later reveals patterns of rumination, resilience, and self-revision. Implicitly, Kotb suggests that revisiting these pages can be clarifying—showing how uncertainty and regret coexist with survival, and how narrative (even scribbled) helps a person metabolize trauma over time.