Diary writing has evolved over time, along with cultural changes and accessibility to materials. It has been around for far longer than the word’s supposed first mention in Ben Jonson’s seventeenth century work Volpone. Oratory and artistic traditions of recording events predate the written form, and evolved into how diary writing is conceived of today. All of us fortunate enough to live in a country with access to pen and paper, or some form of technology to capture our thoughts, have the chance to record events and how we feel about them.
Yet, despite the accessibility of keeping a diary, many do not. There are many reasons for this, but can include a lack of time, feeling embarrassment at the act of writing without an apparent addressee, and the difficulty of instigating a dialogue with oneself on the page. We often look back and cringe at the diaries of our younger years, so we reason that we will do the same in the future if we keep one now.
However, keeping a diary is possibly the single most important thing I have done for my long-term mental health. It brings an incredible level of both self-reflection, and a reflection of how those around us and our circumstances were making us feel before, and make us feel today. It is very difficult to quantify how far you have come in life, if you have nothing to measure it against. Of course, we have our memories, and other personal measures of our success, whatever that means to us. However, on the inside, our emotional progress – that is a different thing altogether. How do we measure it? And what about when the world seems to turn upside down, as it has this past year, and we want to record for ourselves and possible future generations, how it feels to live now?
As a society, we are collectively improving in this regard – but there is no denying that we exist within a culture where we are taught systemically to turn away from how we really feel. Whether that is diet culture telling us to deny our bodily cravings, or patriarchal culture shaming us for aspects of our identity, we are discouraged from expressing our feelings from the second we are born. Writing, in communication with nobody but yourself, is a radical act. It can feel strange at first, and a little self-indulgent. But it is stranger still that the person we spend more time with than any other human, ourselves, is the person we have the least open communication with.
It could be very easy to look back over 2020, for example, and for many to reductively conclude, ‘I spent a year at home, why do I feel so sad?!’ However, the reality is rather more complex than that – something which keeping a diary would help us to realise. We have experienced, among many other things, a combination of financial stress, of isolation, and a longing for those we miss. Added to these are health fears, illness for many, and of course, global panic and uncertainty.
When difficult things happen, especially for any of us who have experienced trauma, our memory can become somewhat interrupted.
Keeping a diary can change this; it opens a dialogue with the self. It allows you to ask, what am I really feeling about this? How did I feel a year ago? How far have I come? We spend so much time alone with our thoughts, which can grow and morph and become confusing. On the page, they change. There is a permanence to them. We can observe our self-criticism, and we can see that we would like to perhaps be kinder to ourselves, to make more space for gratitude and progress, and less for judgement.
Whilst providing a space for you to ponder questions and process events in both the global scene and your personal life, it also helps you to answer them, too. You look back because you can, and even if things feel worse, you are gaining knowledge and recording it so that you can refer back to how far you have come, what you have experienced, and how it has shaped you. There is a sense of power to be had in that, and a sense of optimism that whatever happens, you have an open dialogue and friendship with yourself, on the page, which means that you can fully advocate for yourself.
To conclude, I recommend avoiding perfectionism if you do undertake this project. Your notes app is your friend – as is a simple walk. No distractions, just the question of how do I feel? And the willingness to listen to your answer. We all go through hard times, and we are going through a traumatic one globally, now. I hope that you find things which work for you, and make you feel that no matter what happens, you have somewhere to record how you feel and to see how far you have come.