Earlier this year I found my teenage diaries. Perhaps “found” isn’t the right word: I had known for a long time they were there, stored in boxes at my parents’ house in a room full of reminders of my siblings’ and my early life, taking up space that could surely be better used than as a messy shrine to the past. The boxes had to go. I packed them into my car – three enormous boxes of diaries and photo albums, mix tapes and concert flyers. There I was, from birth to 19. My mother had written my name in enormous letters across the side of each box: EMMA. There I was in permanent marker, the facts of my teenage self in waiting to undo any myth I had created.
I am not sure that I have reconciled to being an adult. There are the totems of my adulthood – a job, health insurance, bills, a house that I live in full of the things I have spent my money on, dinner parties and holidays – but I am fairly certain that I am not actually an adult. I have no children, I don’t own property, and my car is falling apart. Surely an actual adult has a car that doesn’t leak when it rains? My current version of adulthood is that not long ago I walked into a grocery store and was suddenly amazed by the fact that I could buy all the sweets I wanted. When I ask people older than I am if they feel like adults, most of them say “sometimes”.
Memory is loss and because I do not want to say I have lost anything, I keep the things that might remind me that I have far away. I do this to avoid pain, but that is not what I feel for the diaries in these boxes. For them I feel disdain. I feel like in them are all the parts of myself I do not want to look at, do not want to remember.
These diaries have come along at a particular time in my life. I am making choices about children, relationships – I am trying to work out what my life should look like and what I want. I am trying to understand something, to see myself more clearly so that I can make decisions that feel like mine and not anyone else’s. Conversations I have with my friends have taken on a certain tone; we are undoing ourselves in front of each other to try and make sense of who we are.
I am sure that reading my diaries will teach me something I’ve forgotten. I am looking for parts of myself that I have made off limits, and I am not disappointed. There I am across many volumes in a handwriting that is unfamiliar to me. It shifts across the diaries, like I am working out the style of letter that most says “me”. I try on different words and friends; I invent variations of my name as my sign-off. It is like watching a caterpillar turn into just another caterpillar, but never a butterfly.
To be a teenager is to have secrets, and the biggest one that emerges from my diaries is that I felt absolutely unknown. It is written across the pages in my shifting handwriting. None of the versions I have been trying on quite fit. The simple solution of “be yourself” is far less simple when you have absolutely no idea who you are.
At school, my friends and I would play a terrible board game purchased by someone’s mother. It was a version of truth or dare, but you also got cards with adjectives on them which you would hand out during the game. You were left with your peers’ adjectives for you: prettiest, funniest, wildest. You learned quickly that it was easier to be an adjective and you’d better work out which one you were. You weren’t surprised to find out that you were not funny, you were weird – in fact stay away from weird at all costs. Weird is lunch alone, weird is not being invited. And so you learn to shave off bits of yourself that other people don’t want because there is nothing lonelier at 13 than eating lunch by yourself in the music department over a piano. This game has stuck with me over the years as a distillation of the teenage experience. We look for our adjectives and we prescribe ones to others in order to make them understandable.
I feel a deep embarrassment as I read my ramblings. I start to read them with almost only one eye open. I cannot stand to look at this unformed version of myself that feels at once terrifyingly close and distant. There is my body written about with ferocious antagonism, in a war I had waged with myself far earlier than I had recalled. There is the description of my ideal wedding: a man in a grey suit and top hat (inspired by Freddy in My Fair Lady), me arriving in a white boob tube dress in a horse and carriage and my bridesmaids in various shades of yellow and pink, with flower girls wearing wings on their backs, and a party held on a yacht. I am relieved that 15-year-old girls don’t often get to plan weddings.
There are thousands of pages of the minutiae of my existence and it is too much. I ask other women if they kept diaries. Many of them did and every single one says the same thing: “I can’t even look at them.” It starts to feel like we survived something. It is a relief, if one of the things I wanted most as a teenager was to be normal, here is the proof that I was.
After reading my diaries I packed them away, high up in my cupboard, out of my or anyone else’s reach. To write this I got them out again and that same feeling of dread came over me. They sat next to my bed for a few nights and finally I opened them. This time I was looking for something to put here, for you to read. I was looking for a way to curate my teenage self, to take control of her and make her palatable. I was looking for something I could tell you I have learned or that I have figured out from those diaries. But I can’t. They are a capsule of myself and I am protective of that girl.
It felt like a softer touch this time, the embarrassment taken over by some sort of kindness. I am different now. I am the sum total of my experiences, and I have had some that are wonderful and some that have been painful. There are many more ahead. We are all trying to figure out who we are, how we should be. The experiences in my diaries are real and valid. Although they may feel silly, they have informed how I am now. This adult version of me is real, and while I have decided which parts of myself I show to the world, it doesn’t mean the other parts don’t exist. Perhaps we are all just teenagers, hoping the person we like likes us back, hoping we get made captain of the swimming team, hoping we get invited to the popular girl’s birthday party, hoping that we can be seen and known and loved for all the bits of us, even the ones we’ve tried to get rid of.
• Emma Withers lives in Cape Town where she works in the music industry
