9:00 p.m. — July 4, 2024
Dear Diary,
When I was 7 years old, I started writing in a diary. It was pink and sparkly with a lock and a rhinestone P on the front. In it, I wrote about practicing the piano and my baby sister and how “at dinner when I was eating a toco my loos tooth came out!” When I was 9 years old, I had a blue floral printed notebook where I wrote poetry and short stories and proclaimed that “I (was) getting pretty good at this!” (I wasn’t). It started to get a bit darker after that. When I was in middle school, I confessed my deepest insecurities, my worst anxieties and sometimes expressed an overall disdain for myself. When I was 16 years old, I chronicled the ups and downs of isolation during the pandemic and how I learned to enjoy my own company. Today I’m rereading all my diaries in a chaotic frenzy, flipping back and forth like a madwoman and going through an intense range of emotions from pain to nostalgia and everything in between. Reliving the past makes me feel like some sort of masochist. Sometimes my entries were sweet and other times they were just devastating, but I can’t manage to stop reading.
I’ve amassed 14 diaries since I was 7 years old, and reading them makes me wish I hadn’t had so many thoughts in the past 13 years. I take solace in the fact that I won’t have to endure the emotional whiplash much longer, as this is my final flip-through before I destroy each and every one of them. I’ve decided to do so in various different ways to symbolize moving forward without looking back — I’ll throw some in the trash, drown some in the lake and burn the rest to ashes. They contain more mistakes than I’d like to admit I’ve made and looking at them causes more anguish than joy. Besides, their purpose has already been served.
Joan Didion opens her book “The White Album” by stating that “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That is to say, we write to understand. When I wrote each of my entries, I was seeking to understand something about my life, and the same is true when I write in my diary today. Sometimes talking through something on paper is just what I need and once I’ve done so, I can turn the page and move on. In my experience, the understanding part happens during the writing rather than the rereading. As I reread my diaries today, I simply shake my head at my past self as I’m reminded of all her faults and shortcomings. My old thoughts seem so elementary that they make me want to scoff. The only useful thing these entries seem to offer me is proof that I’ve been listening to Lorde since 2013.
Last semester I took Theories of Writing with Professor Monroe Moody of the English Department. The class got me thinking about how the act of writing is separate from the product. Writing is an activity that generates knowledge as you do it, which is how you manage to process emotions and come to conclusions as you write. So why aren’t we all writing with more unfiltered authenticity? Because more often than not, we’re writing for an audience that forces us to screen every thought we have and decide whether it is acceptable. Often as young writers, that audience is made up of peers and teachers whose opinions mean a lot to us, and whom we sometimes tip-toe around when it comes to writing. A personal diary is a unique place that’s free from such bias. Readership is no concern of mine when I expel my most heinous thoughts into my diary’s pages, and so I don’t just write unfiltered, I think unfiltered. Writing in a diary is phenomenal for your psychological health — it helps you process emotions, reduces intrusive thoughts and even improves your memory. But no one has said much about the effects of rereading entries. I can’t imagine there’s much benefit to reliving traumas neatly contained on pages of lined paper, which is why, tomorrow, I’ll be severing ties with my diaries for good. Happy Independence Day to me.
Love, Paige
2:30 p.m. — July 5, 2024
Dear Diary,
Today I sit in my local coffee shop slurping down iced tea as I continue reading through my diaries, watching myself grow up in fast-motion. Like a bystander frozen in time, I watch as people walk in and out of my life, as my outlook on the world changes and as I make mistake after mistake after mistake. It is a special kind of agony to watch it all from the future with no way to stop it, like some sort of warped mirror where I can see all the best and worst versions of myself reflected back at me. As I flip through diary after diary, I go back and forth between wanting to strangle my younger self and wanting to wrap her in a tight hug and reassure her. These entries are heavier than I remember them being. I’m reading about thoughts I don’t remember having — about hopelessness and despair and heartbreak that I’ve since blocked out.
I’m closing down the coffee shop now in shambles, with journals splayed out at all angles around me, surrounded by a thousand past versions of myself. There were versions of me that thought they weren’t skinny enough, pretty enough or smart enough. Of course, I wasn’t at my peak in middle school, but it’s only looking back that I realize just how hard I was on myself. It’s odd how often I look back at my younger self now, at age 20, and wish I was as skinny and pretty and smart as I was back then — which doesn’t make sense and simultaneously makes all the sense in the world, because if there’s one thing that’s clear in these diaries it’s that I don’t know a good thing until it’s gone. It’s more than I expected to face. I need some time to process this, so I’ll destroy them tomorrow.
Love, Paige
11:00 a.m. — July 6, 2024
Dear Diary,
I would destroy the diaries now, but it’s just so nice outside. I’ve decided not to rush the process, so I think I’ll sit in the sun instead. I’ll do it tomorrow.
Love, Paige
10:30 p.m. — July 7, 2024
Dear Diary,
I must confess, I’ve been withholding some things from you, my dear diary. I suppose it’s because I expect an audience to stick their nose in you. I’m looking at you, reader. You know this is a major invasion of privacy, right? But since you’re here I’ll let you in on my secrets just this once.
The first is a particular passage from 2015 that wouldn’t stop running through my head as I held that pink sparkly diary over an Ann Arbor city trash can about an hour ago:
“Dear future self,
I hope that this journal will always be around to read and remind you who you used to be …
Love, Paige”
The second is the fact that I’ve already disposed of a certain volume. Earlier this summer, I put the diary that chronicled most of last year and all of last winter into a shoe box with some mementos I wanted out of my sight, and took them along with a bag of old clothes to a Salvation Army. I thought maybe getting rid of that version of me would rid me of certain demons. It didn’t work. Apparently the past doesn’t need a physical conduit to come back and haunt you, which brings me to my last secret: This whole endeavor has been built on bitterness.
I wanted to destroy these diaries to prove something to myself. I hate being wrong and in those pages I was wrong more times than I could bear to be reminded of. I thought maybe by destroying the evidence I could free myself from that torment. I wanted to prove that I was different now. That I was cooler, more mature, kinder — just better. But as I thought back to that entry from 2015 and my first failed attempt to leave part of myself behind, I realized something.
Maybe I am better than I used to be, but I wouldn’t be without the trial and error that’s chronicled all around me in these pages. It would be cruel and hypocritical for me to claim I’ve grown if I still can’t look my mistakes in the eye. So I didn’t drop my innocent 7-year-old self into a trash can on the street. I came back upstairs to do the thing I hate the most: admit that I was wrong. At 18, I wrote that “I (had) rediscovered myself. It (was) like I finally found that girl that I buried under all those layers of anger and low self-esteem.” Maybe the people we want to be are within us all along, and we just have to do the hard work of uncovering them. And maybe the work doesn’t end after we’ve processed it on a page. If we don’t do some reflecting, how will we grow?
When you move somewhere new, you get the chance to reevaluate who you are and whether that’s who you want to continue to be or not. Since I got to college, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do that — how to keep the better parts of me and work on the worse ones. In rereading my diaries, I’ve decided that the best way to do that is by facing up to my mistakes and learning from them, while I make all kinds of new ones that I’ll learn from later. A few days ago, I wrote that it was agonizing to watch myself fail and not be able to stop it, and while I can’t change the past, I can consult my trusty diaries for how not to repeat it.
Destroying the diaries won’t help me grow as a person — a conclusion I wouldn’t have reached had I never started writing this. Knowing that I’ve grown into who I am today, despite all the slip-ups I didn’t think I’d come back from, is reassuring in a way I’m not quite ready to let go of yet. My diaries sit on my desk in front of me right now, unharmed and doing exactly what my 11-year-old self had hoped: reminding me of who I used to be, with my only worry being that they someday see an audience other than myself. And so, like many naive writers before me, I’ll end this by asking my next of kin to please allow my diaries to die with me. Let this be the last entry of mine you ever read, though it’s far from the last I’ll ever write.
Love, Paige.
Statement Columnist Paige Wilson can be reached at wipaige@umich.edu.
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