One night many years ago I was out for dinner with my best friend. I left the table to get some cash out, and then moments later returned when I realised I had forgotten my card. In the minute I had gone, she had gone into my bag and lifted out my diary.
There she was – my diary opened at a random page – reading hungrily.
We each froze in our awful places for a bit. Then I asked: “What are you doing reading my diary?”
“I just want to see what you write about,” she said.
I was overcome with a feeling of shame. Contained in the journal’s pages was unfiltered feeling – rage, anger, lust, jealousy, inadequacies, bitching and hating – all the feelings too gross to let anyone see.
My parents moved house recently, and I had to sort through all my junk in the garage. I kept all my old diaries – including this one read by my friend – dating back from the 1990s in trunks and boxes. What a strange, horrible sensation it is to binge-read these dusty, old books; their pages (nibbled on by silverfish) full of feelings, and old places and people, everything captured with the urgency of the present moment.
The keeper of a diary is not bound by form, she can leap from inner to outer worlds in the stroke of a pen. What she was eating, where she was sitting, how she was feeling, and some piece of gossip that was playing on her mind – can all be conveyed in a sentence. In our memories, the past is lit up by a single feature (an event, often) – but in a diary, it is all there, the deep and messy texture of life, the nuance.
Reading an old diary is like journeying back through an emotional landscape that you’ve already traversed – in 2013, or 2003 or 1998. It’s eerie. Feelings are meant to be forgotten but there they are, laid out in all their fresh anger, where it is forever the hour when you find out he doesn’t love you.
Walking back through this landscape is not a pleasant sensation: did that really happen? was I really that person it was happening to? why do I keep making the same mistakes?
Reading my old diaries was like opening a box that contains body parts I’ve amputated. It’s a box of bloody, stubby toes that are ragged and dirty. Old, amputated toes. No one wants to see them.
Recently, I met a guy I get on well with. He wanted me to post him an old diary of mine to read. That’s the intimacy test, isn’t it? Would you show someone an old box of bloody, stumpy, amputated toes?
Over my dead body. No way, Jose.
Yet we give access freely to social media – adding people to Facebook or Instagram without a second thought to what or who we are letting in. We live in the time of journalling, of sorts: what are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram except a way of stopping time, or at least marking it?
But our record keeping on these platforms is a public act, performed for others. Our best side, our best lives, our best version of us. These “updates” are the tip, not the iceberg. The true self remains submerged beneath the water.
Your favoured social media platform can reach out to you electronically and say, “Eight years ago you were doing this.” But were you doing that? And what were you feeling about it? So much of social media posting is based on a need we have. As someone wearily pointed out to me: everyone on Facebook wants something from someone else – a like or to sponsor their fun run or to sell some lawn furniture.
How different a diary.
Your diary keeps quiet when it’s the eight year anniversary of when you lost your job and you sat in the food court after finding out, and your internet banking told you there was $6 in your account and you were stricken with fear and shame, as you pondered whether you could actually afford the can of Coke Zero.
You didn’t think you’d survive that, yet years later, reading your diary, you realise you did.
Joan Didion wrote in an essay: “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”
The diaries are also an insurance policy, mostly against the kind of (inevitable) loss that Didion writes about.
Maybe one day, when the outer world recedes to a place that I don’t participate in, then I can once again open the trunk with all the diaries in it. In these notebooks are the worlds I lived in, vivid and alive in all their pleasures and pain.
Maybe then (in my 90s? late 80s?) all I’ll be capable of is sitting in a chair and reading, and I’ll catch up with all these old adventures and I’ll be more forgiving of girl in its pages – the implacable, inescapable “I” of the diaries.
I can watch as her identity crystallises, collapses and then reforms on each page. I can see her always crashing the same car. And I can love her all the same.
