...And How They Shaped The Person I Am
I had my first diary when I was seven years old.It was a Hello Kitty, baby blue notebook. I sometimes wrote in yellow sketch pen so that no one would ever find out my deepest, darkest secrets (I used to fake stomach aches in order to skip school). The only thing that the yellow sketch pen achieved was that my entries from 2003 are mostly unreadable.
I wasn't sure how to go about it, so I treated it like a person. Some entries started with "Hi, Secret Friend". This is an excerpt - "I am not getting any attention. Who said life is fair?"
I wanted to have a diary because my older sister had one which I was not allowed to read (I had read every page). I wanted something secret, something that was mine.
I think the concept of a diary as a person dawned on me after I heard about Anne Frank. As she had been explicitly forbidden to do so, my sister had read it. She was like, nine. I don't know how much she understood.
Influenced by Anne Frank's Kitty, I got a new, more sophisticated notebook. I now referred to my very secret diary as 'Starry'.
Having a diary made me feel important to myself. Whenever I was upset about something (mostly about not getting enough attention), I'd write a scathing entry about my parents and how I was being neglected by them. I think having a journal was so important to me, especially when I was at an age where everything was so confusing and painful. It validated my confused and painful feelings.
They helped me grow. Every few years I would re-read my previous diaries and cringe, unable to believe that I was the same person.
Also, the idea of having a secret was quite thrilling, however tame that secret was. I knew my sister had read my diary because she teased me about a picture of Tom Cruise I had in it for months and months.So I developed a secret code.
When I got a bit older, maybe I was fourteen, I was convinced that something awful would happen to me by the time I was thirty, so I fervently documented things, fearing my mental deterioration. That was about the same time I was sure that I was a genius waiting to be discovered, and my journals (no longer called 'diaries' - 'journals' sounded more grown-up) were full of philosophical gems.
Okay that's a lie. But I thought they were philosophical gems.
The truth is that even though I now had more mature looking notebooks, the stuff in them was still very trivial.
But they were a perfect reflection of the way I felt through my teenage years - the pages were really intense, and longing poured out of them.
Having a journal helped me take myself seriously. A little too seriously, if I think about it. I think I can trace a lot of my anxiety issues to the fact that I had a journal when I was seven years old.
But they helped me figure out the person I am, the many personalities that make me. And more importantly, they helped me figure out who I didn't want to be.
Even though my first reaction on re-reading my journals was to burn them, I refrained as they contain so much history. And also, it's quite amusing.
Please note that the previous page has the lyrics of a song I wrote.
I still keep a journal. I write in it when I feel to empty or too full. Now they mostly contain things like this, when I have absolutely nothing to write about :
I'm so grateful to my parents for respecting my privacy and for keeping up the act that my diaries held important secrets.
But come on, didn't they ever think of yelling at me when I made tables to chart how much they yelled at me against how much they yelled at my sister, instead of laughing about it? Didn't they realise what dire consequences it would have on my already stunted personality?
I'm not going to say that my journals were 100% honest. Remember, there was a point when I thought that they were going to be published and I wrote about things I thought I should be writing about.
And I'm not going to say that they were super interesting. I mean, if I have written proof about what I had for breakfast on 26 January, 2006 in my journal, I don't think I can sell myself as interesting.
But they are such an important part of who I turned out to be.
My journals through the ages seven to sixteen.
