Talking to Myself: The Importance of Keeping a Diary
I’m driving along under a gray March sky in the gray company car to a town I’ve never been to before on a highway that climbs over the Cascades and then rolls south along the coast but nowhere really near it. My iPod is playing songs I fell in love with 20 years ago. Salsa songs. Cumbia. Nothing that makes any sense under this cold gray sky on this cold gray road. I’m singing in Spanish and marveling at how listening to a certain song or seeing an old picture can make the long past more vivid than last week.
I‘ve been reading lately through diaries I wrote ten, twenty, thirty years ago, diligently writing a book I can’t fathom being able to publish or share, ever. It’s ok. I do it for love, not recognition or money. I do it because it makes me happy; in this way I am the most selfish writer I know.
I read these stories that I had forgotten, tales told by a young woman—a girl—with no idea where the plot of the stories are going, just telling them. Contrary to what you might think, you don’t need a wild imagination to write. I couldn’t make up a believable story if my life depended on it. I don’t have to.
The fabulous thing about these diaries is how raw they are, how badly written, how true and unpretentious. Like notes to self, written a long time ago so that I might not forget. That’s exactly what they are. As I read them, I realize how much of my own life I have forgotten. They take what was mine, what I have lost, and bring it back to me.
I open the books and there it is. High school. College. Loves. Devastations. Doubts. Adventures. Rages I’ve forgotten about entirely and suddenly the storm resumes as if it had never ended. Loves I haven’t loved in a decade suddenly burst into the center of my heart.
And you say oh but all of that is behind you. Yes of course. Like the long beautiful tail of a comet, it is behind me.
How much love, how much pure deep true inexplicable emotion poured out over people who never knew or never knew how much or knew but didn’t care. Cared a little maybe but didn’t reciprocate. I want do that poor girl a favor. I want to go back and save her; sit her down to explain a few things, tell her to guard her energy, her hours, her tears, her brilliant love. Don’t throw your pearls to pigs, for God’s sake. But I can’t.
It’s a good thing. Because the life that girl is living in her stories—my life isn’t the shadow of that intensity now. Her life is new-leaf green and brilliant turquoise blue, sunshine yellow and the magenta of blooming bougainvillea.
Save her from what? It is she who has the gift to give me. She can save me from my grayness, remind me that who I am is not who I’ve always been and is therefore likewise not who I will always be. I need someone to tell me that, to promise me, to hold my chin tight in their hands and PROMISE me that today won’t be every day. That gray is the color of a season, maybe, of a road or a town, but still there is yellow and blue and green. Somewhere. For me. Promise me.
She does promise me. This is what I’m coming to: it’s true. For so long I have suspected it, and now I know. That time and our lives, they don’t go along in a line with the numbers of days and years taking us further and further away from a beginning point to an end point. They spiral. And what was far away comes close again. And everything that has happened is still happening on that day in that place—the good things and the bad things.
Nothing is past. Everything is present. Everything I have ever been is who I am. The restless woman driving the gray car today will be no more permanent than the curious girl of seventeen or the intrepid divorcee of thirty one.
If you want to have any idea about the life you live, keep a diary because you will forget. And when the days of your life are gone from you, who will give them back? Who will tell you your own stories? Who will give you your own colors when all you are left with is gray? What was far away will be close again. What is everything now will someday be a whispering memory. Keep your stories. Don’t let them go. This is what I tell the girl. This is what she tells me.
—
Diana is a freelance writer and poet who was born in the traditional Mennonite community of Lancaster Pennsylvania and after many travels is now living in central Washington State.
Her early-childhood memoir, When the Roll Is Called A Pyonder, is scheduled to be released on August 19, 2014 by eLectio Publshing.
Follow her on Twitter: @DianaRZimmerman
Find out more about her on her website dianarenee.com
Category: Being a Writer, Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing
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- Writer’s Links…8/20/14 | All Twangs Romance | August 20, 2014
I live alone, and couldn’t manage without a diary. It’s where I say good morning to myself when I wake, where I dump all those ‘guess what happened today’ titbits that are normally shared with a partner. I’ve got great friends, but my diary is my permanent companion. (And doesn’t leave dirty socks on the bathroom floor.)
Jo, I love how you describe your diary as your companion. How true! I never thought of it that way, but you are exactly right. Its kind of like the invisible who friend who will never rat you out. And then you get to keep it all too, whereas a friend or partner can’t possibly (and maybe shouldn’t!) remember all that. Cheers, sister!
I am a compulsive writer and have a chest full of notebooks and diaries going back over 25 years. I never read them – occasionally look up a reference – and yet they are a treasured possession which I would be devastated to lose. Posterity? I have no idea if my children or grandchildren to come will want them. Maybe I will hold a bonfire of my life as the twilight turns to night….
I often think of that and wonder what will happen to my diaries. I don’t have children and I can’t quite think my stepchildren will want to wade through all that. My niece? Who knows. I also sometimes wonder if they will end in a bonfire. If someone else wants to send them back into the universe that way after I’m gone, I’m ok with it but I don’t think it is something I will do. At least not any time soon.
When my mother moved house out of the loft came a large box full of my diaries and letters. I had forgotten how many long and chatty letters I had written and received. What surprised me wasn’t only the content but the writing itself. They were all written with an ink pen in the closest, neatest handwriting. My current scrawl reflects my hurly burly race through life now as a mother of four. Even our penmanship reflects who we are and how we change.
That’s really true. Beautiful handwriting used to be a matter of pride and now no one has nice handwriting. I can definitely see how my mood effects my handwriting by just glancing at my diaries. The calmer, the easier to read. Very happy and very angry both produce illegible scrawl.
Diana, I love the way you’ve captured beautifully the energy, the essence of what keeping a diary or journal was for you. Having a diary from an early age is such a gift. And as I’m sure you’d agree, it’s never too late to keep a journal. It’s a storehouse, a savings account, a gold mine and a repository for your past, present and future. It serves purposes you’ll never imagine. And the process itself is healing.
I’ve kept a journal since I was 18–off and on–some years writing volumes and other years barely a few entries. But the value of writing for me is way beyond anything I’d imagine. In fact it has given me a right livelihood. I’ve designed journal software (LifeJournal, at http://www.lifejournal.com) and I’m the founder/director of the International Association for Journal Writing (www.IAJW.org), where we interview journal luminaries, offer classes about journal writing, writing memoir and more. Come visit! –Ruth
Hi Ruth,
How wonderful to meet you! I had no idea that journaling had a foundation 🙂 or that there are software products designed for journaling. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and your work. I took a peek at both sites and will definitely be back! Cheers.
When I was about 13, my sisters read my diary, showed it to my mother and then my mother called and told everyone I mentioned what I had said about them.
It shocks me sometimes that I ever have anything further to do with those people… 30 years later I still burn about it.
I’m a writer by profession, and I suffer such anxiety and stress about putting opinon to page sometimes. I’ve gone YEARS without easily hitting a deadline.
i’ve never since been able to keep a journal. I know it would be wonderful for me.
Even therapy hasn’t helped.
Dear JM,
Your reply really touched me. What happened to you is horrible and was not fair. It is in many ways a rape. I have thought about you a lot today.
You are a writer in spite of what happened which means that in some ways you have overcome what happened to you even though in other ways the damage has been more permanent. Of course you could not stop having anything to do with your mother or sisters when this happened; you were a child.
I cannot imagine a therapy that will ease an anger that deep.
Try a journal if ever you feel the need. Take a notebook and start in the back. Write one line and then continue on the first line of the page before, so that you are writing backwards and when you get to the beginning of the book, start on the second line in the back. Use abbreviations. Or whatever idea you like.
Have you ever heard of the online journal called Penzu? Do it for yourself. Write boring things until you feel safe. And if you never feel safe, I, for one, will not blame you.
Light and love.
I envy you. Someone stole my diaries when I was a teen–maybe my brother or one of his friends, my parents, or a boyfriend…I don’t know–they were just gone one day when I returned home from my afterschool job. I’ve been thinking about those journals a lot lately. I wrote every day back then, and now I forget so much of that time that I’d give anything to have those musings. Adolescence was such a different experience for me, without the Internet/social media, than it is for my own kids. The feelings were intense–solitary and lonely–and very much shaped who I am today. I’ve tried to urge my daughter to keep a journal, but her and her friends’ prefer a digital diary–public and shared–for better or worse.
O my god. I caught someone about to steal my box of diaries once–a stranger hauling stuff out of my boyfriend’s car when I was about 20 and we were on a camping trip. I still can’t breathe when I think about that. It’s hard for me to imagine that a public diary does the same thing for you as a private one–but that’s not me judging, it’s just me scratching my head and feeling 40-something. 🙂
I love all of my diaries and despite tossing everything else, I kept them. It’s funny how certain things are SO important and now you read them and wonder why you were so stuck on some guy or issue that seems so insignificant now. I agree, write it down, you will forget.
I totally agree! I often go back through my diaries to “look up” something that seems important now and half the time I can’t even find it! Or there’s barely a mention of it… Amazing. 🙂
An avid diary writer since my teenage confusions, I have twenty years of memories to fall back on any time I need a reminder of current plans. Why do people not write diaries?
I know! I’ve been a diary writer since I was 9 so I cannot comprehend at all why so many people don’t keep diaries.
One of my biggest regrets is throwing out childhood diaries when I moved away from home. I love your quote, “If you want to have any idea of the life you live, keep a diary because you will forget.” Sometimes I write down the top 10 things I’m thankful in a day and re-reading them later brings me such joy. Good luck with your memoir!
Thanks, Karen. …Well I hope you’ve begun again and keep a diary now. You won’t get back what you lost, but at least you will be able to look back, later, on your life now.
As a compulsive diary-keeper, I so liked Diana Z’s paean to dairies!
`Her life is new-leaf green and brilliant turquoise blue, sunshine yellow and the magenta of blooming bougainvillea.`
Yes indeed, and sometimes a dreary gray, murky green or a sad brown, too. Because colours reflect moods and vice versa.