Journal writing is a voyage to the interior.
– Christina Baldwin
I wrote my first ever diary entry in my first ever diary on October 22nd, 1999, two days after my ninth birthday. Like most kids, I formally introduced myself to this newly anthropomorphised book of blank pages: “Hi My name is Laura EliZabeth Fyfe”. Until my final entry in 2005, this book with the gold-lined pages, a cat on the cover, and a blue ribbon bookmark was an extension of myself; a third-party confidant, a strange and separate part of me that I somehow removed from my real identity and placed in the pages of this book.
I don’t remember precisely why I kept a diary. I don’t remember who presented me with this book of blank pages on my ninth birthday, and I don’t remember anyone specifically telling me to record my thoughts in it. Maybe I saw it on television or read it in a book. Maybe I liked the idea of having a secret. (Although there is a good chance that my sister has read it in its entirety because I found it in her bedroom).
I told Dear Diary all about my daily routine; I wrote about fighting with my parents or my new little sister, I wrote about my friends, my cat Mog, my classmates, and eventually the boys I had crushes on. My diary was my friend. My diary was my witness. My diary was a record I kept for future Laura, so she would never forget.
Dear Diary, 2004
On a recent visit home I found this first ever diary; this strange half-told, partially coherent account of a child navigating through the world. It’s interesting to see what I thought was important enough to record and what events I lacked the ability to process or articulate in the moment. For instance, I told a long and detailed story about a boy named Kyle who professed his adolescent love for me, but I didn’t write about my Mother’s death until seven months after she died.
Reading it now, I believe I tried to tell the full story from my point of view, beginning from the moment she found the “lump”, to the day Mum and Dad sat us on the couch and tried to explain to us what was about to happen. For two and half pages I carefully documented the six weeks she was sick, from the daily trips to the hospital, to the endless stream of family and friends. My heart broke for my thirteen year-old self when I read the words “I never lost hope” followed immediately by a recounting of her death. Despite this, much of this short diary entry was a fact-based and unemotional chronology. It wasn’t until I read the last line, 16 years later, that I realized that even then, only seven months after it happened, I was already trying to keep myself at arm’s length from the pain. I was trying to protect myself. The last line I would write for over a year was: “This is too hard to write about now”.
Clean Break
Around the same time I was given a second diary. There were some overlapping entries as I briefly tried to remain faithful to both books; however, I soon made a clean break from what I called the “juvenile” account of my life. It was chilling to see two completely different versions of myself side-by-side and to experience, again, the way my sense of self was shattered and rebuilt in the wake of my Mother’s death. Before September 2004, I experimented constantly with my handwriting, I wrote about fighting with my sister, and I got excited about grade-school parties and cute boys. One year later, when I began writing again, my script was almost exclusively small, tightly written cursive. My first entry began with what can only be described as self-loathing, embarrassment, and disdain for my “young” self. On the page, I wondered rhetorically when I would stop feeling “stupid” about my childish writing, and when I would “get over it”, and “stop dwelling on the past”. In that year I became an entirely different person; a person with no love or patience for my younger self. Perhaps I was envious of her; she had a Mother and I did not. I didn’t want to be in pain any more so I became harder on myself until I couldn’t feel it.
And yet, within these twisted teenage words, there was hope and a tiny cry for help. January 18, 2006: “For some reason I have not felt myself at all. I am usually someone who is always happy and positive…it has been over a year since my Mum passed away, and I am only now feeling the hurt and loneliness.”
Now What?
These days I don’t journal privately or write in a diary, although I have managed to hold onto the two unfinished and disjointed “volumes” of my life. Reading through them has been equal parts embarrassing, enlightening, heartbreaking, and hilarious. They say that journaling connects you with yourself, your thoughts, your needs, and your desires in the moment. For me, journaling about journaling has forced me to revisit my past and get to know all the previous versions of myself. It was an unexpectedly liberating experience.
My last recorded entry was one month to the day before I got married in 2017. I’m not sure what compelled me to return to my diary after such a long hiatus. Perhaps I thought that it was important to document this particular milestone. Funny enough, all I wrote in my ten-line entry was how long it had been since my last entry, that I was getting married and to whom, and that I was stressed. That’s it.
This week I revisited my old diary. Unlike many of my other “recent” entries, this time I dispensed with the typical “it’s been a while since my last entry”. I grabbed a pen and wrote what I was thinking. It is an entirely shallow account of journaling (journaling about journaling about journaling?) and I make no attempt whatsoever to talk about current events, personal issues, or even, for that matter, whether or not I’m happy. After many years of nothing more than the occasional awkward hello, my diary has become a complete stranger. Journaling with pen and paper felt strange and forced. Like my first ever entry, my prose is weirdly formal (although I stop short of providing my name and biographical details). Three years after my last attempt at a regular diary, is my first entry of 2020:
Dear Diary,
If someone were to find this little book and attempt to read the mess of cursive inside, what – or who – would they find?
I gather that I was a much more diligent journaler when I was younger, which is fairly interesting since never in my life have I heard more about the power of recording your feelings than in my late twenties.
It also occurs to me that if anyone ever finds this, they might not even be able to read it because even now, at the time of this writing, cursive has not been taught in many years.
Cards on the table: I actually did try to start journaling again earlier this year. I attempted to do a daily entry aesthetically inspired by “Bullet Journals” on the internet, but it came out looking more like a demented Book of Hours…
In truth, my decision to journal again came from a much more embarrassing source. A while back, I was watching “The Crown”, a Netflix series about the British Royal Family. In it, you occasionally get an imagined intimate look at the Queen’s daily diary. In this diary, she notes the day’s events and perhaps her impressions of all things political, social, and personal. She also appears to lay out the following day of Royal engagements and the like.
I know that the show creators largely made up the content of her personal life, but I think that it’s highly likely that she does actually keep a personal diary. And wouldn’t we all love to get out hands on that some day? Assuming it isn’t incinerated upon her death.
So herein lies the embarrassment: “I would give anything for a chance to see inside the life of the Queen of England. I wonder if anyone would be at all interested in the minutia of my own humble experience. Maybe I should write it down – for posterity!”
Walking my way through that thought and coming out the other end into reality was a very humbling experience. Will anyone care about the words in this little book? Absolutely not. Does that matter at all? Why on earth should it? If I’m absorbing anything from this “How to Be Happy” adventure, it’s that what other people think doesn’t matter – or at least doesn’t matter above all else.
Who knows, maybe my future children, if I have them, will find this a hilarious and embarrassing trip into my adolescent mind. Maybe I’ll lose it. Maybe the house will burn down taking these words with it. Who on earth knows.
What journaling about journaling has reminded me of, dear diary, is not to take myself too seriously and to not focus so much on “posterity”. After all, I really don’t get to choose what version of me is remembered by the small few who know me.
I’m just a socially awkward 29 year old woman trying to be a little happier. Who knows, maybe this will help!
Nice to Meet You
As usual, the lesson this week was far from what I expected. I assumed that writing about my “feelings” would somehow bring enlightenment and maybe, if I was lucky, an overall sense of well-being. When it came down to it, I didn’t write at all about my feelings, but it was fun, if a bit silly, to revisit the practice of journaling, although I do think I need to dedicate more time to it to truly reap the rewards. The most valuable part of this week for me was to get to know past Laura and, for the first time in more than a decade, let her and her words off the page. The things I struggled to write about back then, both important and banal, are the things I still struggle with today – although I like to think that my spelling has improved a bit. For whatever reason, it is reassuring to know that I’ve always been a little weird, introspective, self-loathing, critical, and strangely self-aware. I am glad that all the past Lauras are in the past – it’s a lot less complicated back then – but even though it’s embarrassing to read my old thoughts and feelings, I’m pretty glad I wrote them down.
How to Be Happy 