On Diaries

I’m a sporadic diary-keeper at best. When I feel a certain level of anguish, I find myself drawn to notebooks and pens. My scrawl is indecipherable – immediately, to others (which I suppose is a type of privacy measure), but also mere days later to myself.

Inevitably, writing out my chaotic, sad thoughts leads to me feeling better, and then I stop writing. Rinse and repeat.

I’m a bit horrified to imagine my future biographers ¹ reading these works and getting a completely twisted sense of who I was. There was a time when my day to day existence felt bleak and grim, and the write/feel better/stop writing/feel worse cycle would be more rapid, but I’ve gone to therapy, and I’ve written diaries, and I suppose I’ve just gotten older and wiser, and now I’m often content. And so I write less, which is a shame.

This blog is something different. It’s ostensibly public, but really, who will read it? So it’s sort of a diary, but there’s just this tiny bit of pressure to not be depressing and incoherent, and so maybe that will be good for me.