Have you ever tried keeping a diary? No? Or perhaps you’ve had a go, maybe even several, but always given up in the end? The thing is, to be a true diary keeper, as I am, you have to have be just a little bit obsessed. But that’s okay, we’re all a bit obsessed about something or other, aren’t we? Mine happens to be diary addiction, yours might be … I don’t know, toilet roll hoarding? Netflix viewing? Shoplifting? I reckon that my addiction is safer than yours, so if you feel inspired to follow in my harmless but obsessive footsteps, read on!
When I was thirteen years old, my mother gave me a beautiful little diary for Christmas. She gave me some other presents as well – books, makeup, a pretty coral necklace and a couple of other bits and bobs – but the diary was by far my favourite present. It was a gorgeous thing, with a tiny key attached so as to lock it up nice and tight and proclaim TOP SECRET to anyone who came within dangerous proximity. It was something I could deposit all my deepest thoughts in, my secret desires and shameful confessions (oh that gorgeous PE teacher who sent the tingles all the way up and down my adolescent spine …), as well as jot down the regular events of the day. I loved it! Okay, so nowadays it might look a tad dated, but back then it was perfect. Simply perfect. Here it is.
The following Christmas I got another diary. Bigger this time, with creamy, crenulated pages sewn into a sophisticated brown leather cover. Over the years it’s got a bit battered and pock-marked; nothing special to an outsider. But to me, it was perfect. Simply perfect. Here it is.
Move forward yet another Christmas morning, and my diary-gift was of an Oriental design this time, beautifully bound in soft-to-the-touch material. Perfect! Here’s that one as well.
By the time I’d accumulated several more diaries and added several more years to my life, I had learned that by being a Diary Keeper, you could be two people in one: the person of your everyday life, and the person who found themselves trapped in those multiplying pages you so assiduously wrote each night in bed. But nicely trapped, as in a time dimension, not in prison. You could be the You of Now, or the You of Then. Sometimes it could be quite confusing to know who was who. I or she? Me or her? But I didn’t mind. She didn’t mind. The pronouns didn’t matter. In fact, being confused about who and when and where she was became quite fun! That’s diaries for you.
So the years rolled by, each Christmas bringing her a new diary; each January 1st opening with a brand new blank book, each December 31st closing with a crammed-full one. Another twelve months of experience behind her. Completed, lived, closed, but not lost. Never lost. Each day and word recorded in her diary, stored and treasured. Here’s another one.
And still the years rolled by, relentless, taking her diaries and herself along with them (by now she bought her own), time-travelling life’s up-and-down journey through adolescence and youth, each experience assimilated, recorded, packed, carried along, stored. All those lovely diary-books, all those years, all those memories, those life-lessons learned.
And so she left home, grew up, got a job, made her own home …
Fell in love, got married,
Had her first child, then her next,
Left her home country, moved abroad.
She started a new job, got divorced, fell in love again,
Moved home again and again,
Had another child, married again …
Split up again …
And all of it, all of it, recorded, remembered, stockpiled, treasured.
All those escalating years, the good and the bad and the ugly. Nothing spared; everything gained. Reading back on the bad times became every bit as meaningful to her as reading back on the good times. With the bad, she gained relief; thought to herself Thank God those times are over! Thank God I got through that! With the good, she mused Ah, those were the days! How lucky I was to have had that!
She collected and hoarded more and more life-data in her expanding memory bank. She grew older, became an expert in the art of reflection and reminiscing. On nostalgic autumn days, when all she wanted to do was sit in a comfy armchair with a steaming coffee in one hand and an old diary in the other, she pressed the REPLAY button of her diary-mind and flicked through the passing seasons and years, letting the pages take her on their cinematic journey. She leaned back and read and remembered. Sometimes she closed her eyes and viewed all those different versions of herself, and of others, on her internal Hollywood screen. The girl and youth and woman she once was and still is, in all her different forms. The person of then and now, together with all the other people and places and experiences that accompanied her along Life’s multiplying pages: stored and filed, remembered forever.
And now, several decades down the road, she has accumulated two chest-loads of diaries. Obsessional indeed. A magnificent obsession. (Wasn’t there a film by that title?)
So have a look at her second chest. Have you noticed there’s no space left in it, which is why the beautiful green embossed diary that her children bought her for Christmas is standing out on its own rather ostentatiously? Next year she reckons she’ll have to buy a third chest.
Now here’s the thing to ponder.
When she is dead and buried, the words of her diaries will live on, together with her family and friends and foes and colleagues and acquaintances and neighbours and the occasional random passerby. Maybe even you! All those people and places and experiences, all of them captured in the fisherman’s net of time, are now safely transferred to pages that once were blank, secret, locked with a key, but now are downloaded, digitalized, saved into the hard drive of the future. A new chapter for someone else.
Perhaps it’s time for you to to embark on that same compulsive, addictive, fanatical, all-consuming, yet at the end of the day, gripping journey?
……………..
Wendy Skorupski 