I've been keeping a diary pretty consistently since 2004. One of the sub-editors at my first job encouraged me to do it because, he said, I would regret it if I wasn't able to look back.
There's nothing particularly worth reading in these diaries, to be honest. It's mostly promises of new leaves and angst about being a failure. I never, ever, reread what I've written. I can't bring myself to turn the pages back to see what I was committing to paper two years ago. I don't want to destroy them though.
And more and more I can't bring myself to commit things to paper. I have my latest diary open to a page, and I scribble a date, and sit with a thousand thoughts waiting to be written. But I can't get them down.
I think that writing things down will make them real, and there are things I long for, or am denying, or am afraid of, that I don't want to be real quite yet, so I don't have to face up to them.
2 comments:
I know what you mean, about writing things down feeling like it makes them real.
I sometimes use this as a kind of intermediary step: http://thequietplaceproject.com/thethoughtsroom/ It's a website where you can write out your thoughts, but then the script melts away. (Have to admit, the first time I used it, it left me sobbing; it drew things out of me that I don't think I could have written down in any permanent way.)
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