I started keeping a diary in 1979 when I was nine years old. It was bright yellow and came with a gold lock and a tiny key. Believe it or not, I’m looking at that very diary right now. The key is long gone, and the cover has faded to the color of wheat, but it’s still decorated with carefully selected stickers. On the front is a striped kitten, a tiny chipmunk in green shorts, and a little dog wearing a red winter coat. On the back are ladybirds and bunnies, plus this declaration in dark blue ink: “Harriette waz here, ’83.”
In 1979, I was a young girl who rode a fat Shetland pony named Ginger through Vermont’s verdant fields and played The Dukes of Hazzard with the boys next door. By 1984, I was officially a teenager in my hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand, longing for a boyfriend, occasionally squabbling with girlfriends, and constantly lamenting the dullness of my adolescent life.
For five years, I had a mere four lines to capture my daily thoughts, feelings, ideas, dreams, and fears. Four lines! To compensate, I made paper pockets for the inside of each cover, obliquely labeled “Memories” and “ETC.” My diary was literally bursting with words and mementos. Today, I can carefully reach inside each tiny treasure trove and find relics of my past.
Here’s an excerpt from a letter a 13-year-old pal wrote to me (she’d typed it to practice the skill we were all learning that year, in the most useful class of my high school career). It reads: “Today was the most boring day of my life. We’ll have to do something really hilarious to cheer evry body up, ‘cause we’re all so DEPRESSED!!!!!!!!!”
Here’s another treasure, folded and tucked into the back pocket of the book: A pledge marked Top Secret and signed by me and a friend ensuring that we will not eat “junk food (chips, chocolate etc.) and will not snack in between meals until July 31st or until further notice.” The agreement includes a formidable P.S.: Do 20 mins. exercise each day. Make up an EXERCISE CHART and Stick To It!
One more resolution, this one set off with asterisks and all caps: *STOP BITING NAILS*
My five-year diary was the harbinger for a lifetime of journals and journaling. I remember thinking that if anyone ever read my diaries (God forbid), they’d have no idea anything meaningful was happening in the world since I rarely wrote about events beyond my own little life.
I suppose you could glean some knowledge of pop culture through references like “I love Duran Duran” or “Saw Dire Straits in concert tonight.” But that’s the beauty of a diary: It’s yours to fill however you want.
The last time I kept a daily journal was during each of my pregnancies. I’m so glad I did. The experiences and memories I captured in each volume were the basis for detailed letters I later wrote to my boys about their gestation and birth. Plus, both pregnancy diaries give me incontrovertible evidence of the hell my darling babies put me through while they were in utero. The proof is there should I ever need it … just saying.
A final thought. I’m sure all this “diarying”—it’s not a word, but it should be—has something to do with my becoming a writer. Every night for many, many years, I’d climb into bed, pull out a pen and my private book, and mentally retrace my day before drifting off to sleep. Surely my nightly writing habit has helped me develop a practice, maybe even a craft, for sifting through and sorting out thoughts, experiences, or events.
It’s been an impossible habit to break—not that I’d ever want to. Even today, if I’m up at 3:00 a.m. because a seed of an idea has planted itself inside my brain, I know sleep will be impossible until I’ve written it down.
More accurately, I know I won’t be able to sleep until I’ve “written it out”—out of my head and onto the paper, where, if I’m lucky, it might take root, sprout, and then blossom into something worth saying.
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