Dear Diary, why did we abandon you? The pros of keeping a journal

You know how at school some girls dreamt about getting good marks and meeting a bland but attractive boyfriend who would do exactly what they told them to? For my part, the fantasy was always about somehow coming across the diary of someone, anyone, and discovering that they were fawningly and pathetically jealous of me.

How gratifying it would be, the younger me thought. How delicious too, if there was some bonus embarrassing stuff in there about an addiction to pre-cubed cheese bags. In the mid-’90s, it truly seemed possible that some poor kid, having noted and duly recorded my distant brilliance, would accidentally have their private thoughts revealed to me. Alas, it never happened.

Bridget Jones and her diary: keeping a journal was once a totally normal thing to do, as well as a useful narrative device.Credit: ©Universal

The funny thing is that while I was aching for the unearned jealousy of others, I simultaneously coveted a diary of my own. There was a Scholastic Book Club Diary that had an array of brightly coloured sections and neat tabulations that allowed both for organisation (useless because this was outsourced to my parents) and secrets (of which I had none, aside from my crippling fears).

Despite ultimately receiving the diary, I never wrote anything down in it. Or at least nothing of a blackmailable quality. Diaries are a double-edged sword if, like me, you have an anxiety disorder such as OCD. On the one hand, there is the dreadful fear that anything written down will, by virtue of being written down, come to fruition. On the other, recording the mundane details of one’s day could theoretically provide a reassuring record that NOTHING BAD HAPPENED except that the OCD brain then suggests that ACTUALLY MAYBE YOU JUST WROTE IT DOWN WRONG SO LET’S REVISIT IT AGAIN TO CHECK. Happy times.

More broadly, and putting my neuroses aside, it seems to me that there is a chasm in the culture where diary keeping once was. Until recently, diary keeping was so normal that it became its own narrative tool. In the ’80s, we had The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole; then in the ’90s, Bridget Jones’s Diary. In the former, the reader is treated to analysis of Thatcher’s Britain and something called a giro. In the latter, we are offered insights that by today’s standards are completely provincial and unprivate.

Almost a decade later in Mean Girls, the Plastics kept a Burn Book, a written record of everyone at school that they hated and the reasons for same. In the movie’s third act, Regina George distributes the tome to the masses. The early noughties also gave us the delightfully wholesome Princess Diaries, and later on, Amy Elliott Dunne’s brilliant stitch-up in Gone Girl. Keeping a diary was not only a useful framing device, but also a totally normal thing for a person to do.

But I can’t think of a recent fictional work that has employed the use of a diary. I also think that keeping a written diary is not really done any more. I wonder whether part of this is that people are much more accepting of traditionally private things being put in the public domain. For the most part, this is a good thing but also sometimes disgusting, like when people share their nose job recovery pictures or their recipes for microwaved brie.

Also, the mundane things that we still keep private from the world at large are now retained electronically. Every argument with a partner, every premenstrual purchase of an item of clothing that looks like a sack, every last-minute cancellation of a hairdressing appointment booked when you thought maybe you could pull off avant-garde but then realised you were just ovulating, is contained within our devices. This creates a lasting record not just of what we perceived (as a diary would), but of what we actually did.

And yet, the people in charge of our electronic records – most of whom my handy bedside DSM tells me have personality disorders – do not seem like the type of people one would want to trust with whatever relics of private thought we have left.

So with that in mind, I say bring back the diary and the wholesomeness of the physical act of writing. Also, let’s have more TV shows and films in which someone keeps a diary and it comes true, or people learn a spooky secret from it or something.

For people that are interested in the concept of personal growth, a diary can provide evidence of evolution, or failure. For those of us with an anxiety disorder, it can confirm that we definitely did not say anything weird to our kid’s swimming teacher who we don’t actually ever talk to anyway.

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