Topic: Teenage diaries

[tookish]

I recently found a slew of teenage diaries that escaped the great burn of 2009. Here's a few choice excerpts which prove beyond all doubt that I was a total twat at sixteen:

'I think what I love so about Oscar Wilde is that he knew the things that I know. Poor Oscar, with the unfeeling Bosie! Poor Quen, with the unfeeling [redacted]!'

'[Redacted] has a terrifying head. [...] it resembles a cube with hair.'

'I made a rather clever analogy in General Studies today, which fell on dull and unappreciative ears. Ay there's the rub.'

'As I write, I lie in repose on my unsexed and virginal bed. [...] Do you ever just long to be ravished? (Ideally by Miriam Margolyes, natch)'

'My smile is not what one might call broad; it is more a square, contorted grimace that fears to spread outward. My nose has no such reservation and spreads out at any given opportunity.'

'As breasts go, they are all right. They fall well and do their part to give me a waist. But mostly they look swollen, distorted, even, as though by my own carelessness I have allowed them to balloon. When I lie down, they quiver ominously like blancmanges.'

'Am I the only person in the world paranoid about their navel? I have a morbid fear of lint.'

Do you have any of your teenage diaries? Were you a pretentious twat too?

[Buelligan]

Heheh, no, I didn't write to myself very much.  Found a letter I wrote to someone I was in a relationship with (a serious one) a long time ago.  Telling them what I needed and wanted, never sent and never received by either of us.  I don't think it would have made any difference, a tree talking earnestly to a squirrel.  What an idiot I am.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

That last line you've quoted from your diary is a corker, tookish.Great Miriam Margoyles reference too, real female + lesbian version of Morrissey stuff.

[madhair60]

When I lost my virginity I stuck the used condom in my diary to mark my conquest. I still have the diary and the condom is, hopefully, still inside. I wish this was a fucking joke.

[Buelligan]

I think that's incredibly romantic.  I have a small box of hair.  Not even lying.  It's the soft black hair of the best dog that ever lived.  We never had sex but I loved her.

[imitationleather]

When I lost my virginity I stuck the used condom in my diary to mark my conquest. I still have the diary and the condom is, hopefully, still inside. I wish this was a fucking joke.

Wish I'd thought of that.

So I could scrape some DNA and CLONE HER.

[tookish]

When I lost my virginity I stuck the used condom in my diary to mark my conquest. I still have the diary and the condom is, hopefully, still inside. I wish this was a fucking joke.

There's something disgustingly poetic about that.

[tookish]

I think that's incredibly romantic.  I have a small box of hair.  Not even lying.  It's the soft black hair of the best dog that ever lived.  We never had sex.

I have a box of cat whiskers and fur tufts, too, from cats long since passed.

[Buelligan]

Heheh, yes, I have the whiskers by my bed in a tiny old poison bottle.  Ikebana for the soul.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

I think that's incredibly romantic.  I have a small box of hair.  Not even lying.  It's the soft black hair of the best dog that ever lived.  We never had sex but I loved her.

I once knew a Slovak girl who kept the hair of a former lover in a plastic bag.  I remember watching her sitting on her bed, running that  hair through her fingers , a plaintive look of longing on her incipently tearful face. For all those awaiting a " Lisa Lookalike"[1], she looked uncannily like the actress Cherie Lunghi.

1.	I mean someone who I a judge to physically resemble someone else, not someone who looks like me, like Alan Titchmarsh or Mark Benton or Joseph Merrick

[Butchers Blind]

Tried writing one during my early teenage years but it was just a catalogue of things I'd done or seen that day.  There was no emotional context to wrap it in so it kind of resembled a shopping list of events.

[Janie Jones]

My parents read my diary when I was 14; my big secret at that time was that I smoked cigarettes.  I grew up in the North East of England but my parents were from elsewhere and didn't know any dialect words.  So when they read 'Shared a tab with Elaine on the way home' and 'Bought 5 tabs off Spike' they assumed I was on acid and by the time my grown-up brother who spoke Geordie intervened, I'd been beaten shitless.  Mind, I'd have still had the beating for smoking fags.  I subsequently wrote parts of my diary in a combination of bad German and backslang which is still ridiculously easy to decipher 30 years later.

[DolphinFace]

When I was 10 I behaved like a twat for my grandma while at her house. She did every thing she could to cheer me up but I was just being a little cunt no matter what. Later that day while in the delights of my own home, I found out it was the anniversary of her husband's death. I wrote an apology letter to my dead grandad for how I had treated her. I so much wish I could read it now for a good laugh.

[tookish]

Love the German/backslang part. Not so keen on the beating and want to give you a huge hug, parents can be such shits.

I used to write secret bits of diary in Tolkienesque runes, mostly about feeling suicidal/hating my dad. Occasionally I would obliterate the names of girls at school I fancied but they're still very visible under the scribble.

[sirhenry]

I still have the diary I was given for my 16th birthday. It has only one entry:

October 21st - Dad died yesterday

Sorry I wasn't more eloquent, Tookish.

[Consignia]

I'm surprised anyone keeps a diary as a teen. The last thing I'd want to do record the tedium of the minutiae of my life then.

Anyone I'm tookish here is actually Rufus Hound desperately scraping the barrel for a new Radio 4 series. I'm on to you.

[JaDanketies]

When I was about 13 and in the most awkward phase of puberty I kept a diary for a short period and then tore all the pages out and binned them. I really regret that. I've got diaries from when I was a pre-teen but they're boring. Not enough angst or emotion.

I was recently reading some forum posts I wrote when I lost my V-card but I was 19 and had a pretty mature attitude about it at the time so it wasn't cringy. Wish I'd kept the jonny.

I've got a livejournal that I updated when I was 16 that contains some tragedies, as I'm sure do my old forum posts. Some edgelord ironic bigotry in it, I really hope my son doesn't think that shit is funny. 

I went to a party last night. There was no weed but plenty of beer - I brought 12 cans of my own.

I didn't stop drinking the whole night. I got way past double figures in my pint consumption. I almost threw up after bonging chilli powder through wine. (What? It seemed like a laugh).

So I'm not feeling too hot right now. I reached 13 beers and a lil' wine too. It's not big and it's not clever.

[checkoutgirl]

When I was 10 I behaved like a twat for my grandma

That's worded like you were doing your grandma a favour.

[Dex Sawash]

That's worded like you were doing your grandma a favour.

I had visions of Bart doing Teddy Bear Picnic on the bar at Moe's

[flotemysost]

Even as an annoying self indulgent teenager (and still, as an annoying self indulgent adult) I found it really hard to write anything that wasn't "for an audience". I wrote a lot of utter guff (mainly articles and scripts) and knew realistically no one was ever actually going to read it, but it still always needed some sort of "purpose" or "brief". For that reason, writing a private diary never really appealed.

I did have a LiveJournal blog when I was about 15 and harbouring dreams of becoming a sarcastic features writer. It's basically just me offering scathing hot takes on issues of the day (from what I can remember, 50 Cent, Snow Patrol, my local church, and the clothing label Von Dutch all got it in the neck). Thought I was so fucking cool.

[I.D. Smith]

I kept a very sporadic diary through the 90s and early 00s, before finally making it a regular, daily entry from 2004 onwards. I do often wonder why I do it and who for, but I've started now and my archival need for things to be complete won't let me stop.

I suppose a self-important part of me wonders if they'll be "discovered" by a family member or historian after I die, but how interesting or useful a box of diaries full of entries like "Went to work. After work I played some more Horizon: Zero Dawn for a bit. Watched another episode of The Wire. Attempted a workout. And that is it" will be to future generations, I don't know.

[Buelligan]

I must admit, my brother and I have both made some fairly unusual decisions in our lives and we come from a long line of odd behaviour.  I do sometimes consider that it might be useful for later travelers to leave some sign, some rudimentary map or explanation.  Sometimes I have a nasty feeling that I might be roiling around in a bog previously visited by others, that there may even be bodies down there somewhere.  Dunno.

[Attila]

I've got fluff & fur, and whiskers from my long-gone cats and dogs, too -- the poison bottle for whiskers is a top tip. I like to spin and weave, so some of the fluff is in abundance because it was brushed off a fluffy dog with an eye to making yarn from it.

I've kept a diary since 1975 (about half a year; I was 9 going on 10) and then from 1 January 1976 onwards. It's such a habit writing every night that I feel weird when I don't. It's only been the rare occasion when something so awful has happened on that day that I need a day or two before I can process enough to write it down.

Absolutely positive it is filled with so many annoying pre and teenaged stuff...

I found out (from my sister, because my mother told her), that both of my parents avidly read my diary, which is why I was almost constantly under house arrest despite being one of the most boring, loner kids/teens alive. They misread absolutely everything I wrote down. It's one reason she told me to hide them, as they were seriously talking about having me sent away to a 'special school' simply because I wrote about having a crush on a boy on my schoolbus, stuff like that. I started writing in garbled French (then added Latin and German as I learned them, plus weird abbreviations that I made up), and starting hiding them. I knew I'd been successful when my dad confronted me demanding to know where they were.

One thing I really miss, not being able to travel, is buying blank books from museums and stationers. Just not as much fun picking out new ones online.

[sirhenry]

Rather than writing out my angst as a teenager, I drew. I still have a couple of dozen A4 sketch books that I used to escape the world in, designing logos, typefaces and all sorts of designs (realism was always a problem for me). They started off being hugely Roger Dean influenced, moving on to art nouveau whiplash and geometric Mucha-style layouts and just kept morphing over the years so they still act as a kind of diary of emotions and developing world view.

Unlike the 'this is for future generations' thing with diaries, these have turned out to be really useful over the years. When a client asks for a logo ("I don't know what I want but just give me a few to choose from" bastards) I can always go through these and pick out a few ideas in different styles without too much trouble.

For a few years I stuck to some bright yellow A4 hardback notebooks that had wonderfully smooth paper despite being cheap but they stopped making them. I remember the sales assistant being bemused that I wanted the last 4 they had (and any that were in the stores (none)), but I was working on a design that spanned 12 of the spines into one picture. They were known as the Banana Books and I still have a wonderful fronticepiece for one with Cerebus drawn by Dave Sim and another with an irate banana shouting "Why d'you want a fucking banana!?" by Bill Sienkiewicz.

Pictures > 1k words.

[thenoise]

Not as romantic as getting out the quill, but my teenage diary was written in a Word 2.0 document under a password (name of girl i fancied at the time, what else?). It's a bit angsty, a little bit moaning about my Dad (probably less than I do now), mostly just moaning about how bored I was. Pretty tedious.
I kept a review of every film I watched for a few years that probably makes more compelling reading, to be perfectly honest.

[bgmnts]

Didn't start journalling until later in life but I imagine the contents are just as vacuous and grimly shit as the teenage pages of thoughts and feelings.

[JaDanketies]

Didn't start journalling until later in life but I imagine the contents are just as vacuous and grimly shit as the teenage pages of thoughts and feelings.

back when I was a teenager I hung around in the same area as hundreds of other teenagers with endless drama, first crushes, accidental and intentional offence and something new and interesting happening every day.

Now I work from home during lockdown.

[icehaven]

I kept a daily diary from when I was about 11 until my late teens. They're all in a box at my Mum's, and I haven't looked at them in nigh on 20 years. I'd actually like to have a look through them again now as while it's eyerollingly embarrassing reading your teenage nonsense when it's only a few years later and you're a young adult heartily rejecting your naff teenage self, when you're approaching middle age and can barely remember how it felt it'd actually be quite nice to be reminded. I'd like to see what I've completely forgotten too, entire years probably.

[Blinder Data]

I think I wrote four or five long-winded and pretentious entries aged 16-18. I don't think I could look at them now. It's essentially a few thousand desperate words asking "WHY IS EVERYONE ELSE SHAGGING PEOPLE BUT ME". You couldn't pay me enough to go back to those days.

[flotemysost]

One of the funniest bits of teenage writing that I've come across (as in, from someone I know) was a Word doc of song lyrics my brother had penned. Most of them were from his bombastic Dream Theater phase but I think there was the odd cringey sex lyric too.

We also unearthed an old notebook of his, featuring the below classic:

List Of Things I Hate

1. EVERYTHING