Teenage diaries

[canadagoose]

I've got regular diaries that I wrote from age 14 to about 23, but when I got to my twenties the entries became a bit more sparse. I've been writing a diary again recently. The secret diary of me, aged 31¾, or something. I find it cathartic to be able to write about my feelings without having to understate them for others' sake.

[markburgle]

I was defs pretentious and also quite self-pitying (but also, to be fair, clinically depressed). Wish I had kept a diary, it would've been good for me, and I've forgotten so much. I'm sure it would have been full of overwrought nonsense, but better out than in.

I did find one of my bleak teenage attempts at lyric-writing stuffed into my mother's toiletry bag once, which she'd obviously found somewhere. I only remember a bit about "The dopamine factory takes a 24 hr break" - it was fucking mortifying to think that she'd read it. We didn't really talk in our family, so if you wanted to know what was going on with anyone you had to count on finding bits of paper they'd scribbled their innermost thoughts on.

I started a diary a year ago. Partly to feel accountable to something in my bid to turn my life around. Weirdly, I'm only occasionally successful at being honest in it. I can write a whole slew of perfunctory "Did this then that" type entries before it occurs to me that maybe the thing that's been really bothering me the last few days might be worth a mention.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

I kept a diary of startling banality in my teenage years, for what seemed an eternity, but can only find ones for 1996 and 1997, so maybe that was all I did before getting bored of it. There's some absolutely scintillating stuff, let me tell you.

I'm thrilled beyond words to be able to discover that on this day in 1996, I sat my Chemistry standard grade prelim[nb]Scottish equivalent of mock GCSE[/nb], and surprised a fox.[nb]by my mere presence, I didn't buy it a pair of earrings or a spray of chrysanthemums[/nb]

On this day in 1997, I watched the film Shallow Grave on TV in the evening, but evidently felt no need to elaborate further.

[Jockice]

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.

I did one when I was about 14 and it was exactly the same. The only other time I've tried writing a diary was when I was 20-21. When I'd write about emotional and serious things sometimes but usually in a very frivolous way. I didn't want anyone else to read them (ie my mother. I still lived at home at the time) and get worried. I didn't keep it for the entire year though, as I ended up thinking that I'd never want to read it in the future nor would I want anyone else to read it in the future, so binned the thing.

One of my newspaper colleagues was an obsessive diary writer though. He'd carry it around with him in a plastic bag and add stuff to it during the working day. If he had to leave the office during the day he'd lock it in his drawer and he'd take it home at night. He'd also get very angry if anyone tried to snatch it off him or read it. Or even make jokes about Samuel Pepys or Adrian Mole.

I was good friends with him (we went to  loads of concerts together) but even I was never to find out exactly what he was writing, but discovered he'd been doing it since his childhood, so there must have been volumes of it at home. Unfortunately he got cancer and died a few years ago and I don't know if his family have read them since.

I was hoping he'd leave them for me in his will. But I got nowt. He was (and still is) in mine though. I'd left him my entire collection of music by The Fall. He didn't like The Fall. Probably why he decided to die first.