Looking For A New Year’s Resolution? Try Keeping A Diary

From vogue.co.uk

Writer Holly O’Mahoney – a lifelong diary keeper – makes the case for putting pen to paper in 2023 

I discover them while helping my parents pack up the family home we’ve lived in since my early childhood. They’re peeping out of a dusty box brought down from the loft, nestled amongst forgotten toys, fading photos and a cluster of sentimental cards promising friendship forever. My old diaries. 

Gingerly, I prise open the clasp of what looks likely to be the earliest (a fluffy, fluorescent notebook with a miniature lock and key), and find myself on the page, aged nine-and-three-quarters, declaring through multicoloured gel pens that it’s Christmas Day, 1999, and I don’t believe in Santa.

I won’t pretend I’ve written in a diary every day since then, or even every year, but this scrawly confession is the first record I have of my continuing obsession with putting my thoughts on paper. As an adult, keeping a diary is the new year’s resolution I renew every year – and it’s never too late to start. 

                                                                                                                  Alasdair McLellan

Peering back into the boxes, I retrieve the rest, knowing that between them, these diaries that begin in princess-pink notepads and progress to Moleskine heavyweights carry me from adolescence through to early adulthood, documenting what I was doing and, more interestingly, how I felt about it at the time. 

I always assumed I’d pore back over the pages of my diaries at some point (why write one otherwise?), but this was the first time I felt enough distance from my younger self to care about reading her thoughts. 

Flicking through, I find myself leaving primary school with glamorous visions of what life as a senior will entail. Not journalling, apparently, because there’s little recorded from my tween years, save for mind maps illustrating the hierarchy within my friendship group and the names of boys I fancy enshrined in hearts – as every teen movie instructs us to do.  

My diary becomes my closest confidant aged 15, and it’s a juicy if cringeworthy read. I feel estranged from the foul-mouthed, furious girl who feels imprisoned by her parents, betrayed by her friends and devastated at not having found lasting love already. Did I really argue like that with my teachers? Invite a group of friends over to the house where I was babysitting? Lie on MSN to a boy I’d never met about how sexually experienced I was (or wasn’t)? Next chapter, please. 

I feel more affection towards 18-year-old me, who is unsophisticated enough to declare herself “the kind of person who prefers a party to a painting” by way of justification for spending the majority of her gap year raving on the beach, because I know this was the year I cemented friendships with three of the most important women in my life. 

I’m easier company by the pages of my early twenties, when my hormones have settled down and my mind is less turbulent. I smile over recollections of pre-drinks sat on living room floors at a time when nights out held so much potential, but wince for the 23-year-old journalling (instead of sending) an anguished letter to an ex-boyfriend following a painful break-up. Elsewhere, a stray shopping list proves a surprising highlight when I spot the ingredients for a dish I still make a decade later. 

Some people have clear, practical motives for keeping a diary. One friend told me it was through rereading her journal that she realised the negative impact big druggy nights out were having on her life, which led her to make some positive changes. Another committed to writing one when her mum became seriously ill in order to archive their remaining time together and process what was happening. 

I’m not sure why I keep a diary. Perhaps it’s a case of main character syndrome, a result of too much time spent living in my head, romanticising encounters and feeling nostalgic about moments before they’ve even passed. Memorialising these occurrences on the page feels like reinforcing their significance. 

Regardless of personal motives, in most instances, journalling comes from a desire to “know thyself” – a maxim which can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. When written honestly, diaries can teach us a lot about ourselves. They’re a chance to revisit the past, reflect on how we’ve grown, and, sometimes, resolve to do better in the future. Be faithful to your diary and with it you can have the most intimate, long-standing relationship of your life. 

Of course, a diary is only as reliable as its narrator, and even then, it offers a wholly one-sided version of events. Aged 11, I lost sight of the brief, writing fictitious entries about holidays I hadn’t been on, inflating friendships with girls in my class and inventing a list of sporty hobbies for my more bookish parents. I’m not really sure why. 

A lot of my early journalling suffers from self-censoring, too. I remember refusing to waste words on my love life “dramas” while travelling, feeling ashamed they were taking up space in my thoughts when I was lucky to be seeing and experiencing incredible new things. Looking back with a renewed interest in my younger self, I’d gladly scrap descriptions of temples (easily found on Wikipedia) if I could read more about what I was really thinking at the time. 

Looking at photos from the same trip, there’s a jarring dissonance between my care-free smiles and the insecurities being logged on the page. The ability of social media smiles to mask toxic inner monologues is well documented, of course, but in an era when many of us allow the camera to be our chief archivist, I’m grateful for the honesty (well, semi-honesty) of my journal. 

These days, a lot of my journalling is digital. While virtual files carry none of the charm of a paper diary, it’s reassuring to know there’s less chance of losing records to a house move or water damage. Digital diaries also come with the added bonus of being easily searchable (unless for me the search word is “lockdown”, which pulls up hundreds of mind-numbing reads from 2020/21).

Reading my journals meant revisiting old wounds and questioning some past decisions, but it has left me feeling more connected to my younger self and grateful to have these records. While I’d like to think I’m more reasonable and self-assured than I was in my teens, it’s affirming to remember that many of my interests, peeves and guilty pleasures (from spending too much money on shop-bought coffees to sunbathing in the midday heat) have been with me for so long, as have many of my closest friends. 

I’m glad I caught up with my younger self, but feel ready to close the cover on her for now, and focus on living – and, yes, journalling – the next chapter.

https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/keeping-a-diary