Dear Diary

Reading the diary of my eleven-year-old self to find the answers to aging.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

January 15, 1981

Dear Diary

Today was Gwen’s birthday she got Candi, bingo, hat, and shirt. For a good-sister present I got this diary. We went to school and had library. Tomorrow we have gym which I hate also Lisa has to go to the doctor. She’s been having trouble constantly throwing-up the doctor thinks it’s emotional, but her mother won’t believe it.

Sounds like the start of a middle school novel, doesn’t it? If you took away the poor grammar and punctuation, it’s almost the start of Judy Blume novel. But it’s not. It’s the first diary entry I ever wrote, way back when I was eleven years old.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing myself to Judy Blume, but I sure do see a story in there, don’t you?

I have written a diary or journal for the past forty-three years of my life. My mother gave me a diary because I was reading Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank and was inspired to keep a diary myself. I spent the first few years documenting my days but, as I grew older, my diaries became journals in which I not shared things that happened in my life, but also how I felt about them. Now I am 54 years old and have amassed a collection of books that I keep in a box which moves with me from home to home.

For years, I didn’t look at my collection. To be honest, I was afraid to look at them, to see the raw emotion that I poured out onto the page when I was feeling my worst. But, in my late middle age, I am grappling with who I am and what I want, and I am suspicious some of the answers lie in the pages of my diaries and journals.

Maybe my eleven-year-old self knows what’s next for me? She wasn’t hindered by society and the pressures of adulthood can I, in my past innocence, find a map to my future? Maybe I can remember what I loved to do? Maybe I will find the origins of the things I still struggle with today?

My first diary was easy to find. It’s bright yellow, black, and plaid cover with “Top Secret!” and (ironically) “Historic Document” stickers all over it, make it easy to find amongst the piles. The diary covers the years between 1981-1985-my coming-of-age years. It holds the story of a girl trying to make her way through the hormonal shifts of puberty, boys, and moving from Ohio to California within its pages.

With so many years within one book, I obviously didn’t write every day, but there is a lot of information about that time in both my life and the world:

• My favorite songs of 1981 were Young Turks by Rod Stewart and Take It On the Run by REO Speedwagon. (Don’t judge! I was eleven!)

• I loved reading, even back then. In addition to Anne Frank’s diary I read  I Never Promised You a Rose Garden by Hannah Green.  

• I started writing about my weight at age 13 when, at 119 pounds, I thought I needed to lose about twenty pounds because I was “fat and ugly”. There are far too many entries listing everything I ate in a day.

• I had my first kiss in August 1984 and wasn’t impressed, writing, “it’s not what it’s cracked up to be”. Don’t worry, I change my mind later in the diary when I kiss another boy.

There are things in those entries, if I think about them, that help me on this new journey:

• I realize I liked music enough to keep track of my favorite songs. Perhaps I should try to listen to more music, or go to concerts? (I made a playlist from the list of songs in my childhood diary. You can listen to it here.)

• I obviously loved memoirs and autobiographies, and I still do. In fact, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a fictionalized autobiography and I often tend to write autofiction these days myself. I should read it again.

• I am on a health journey, but I need to remember not to let society’s expectations hurt my self-esteem. I need to be kinder to myself.

• And, after thirty years of being together, I need to remember to kiss my husband more often. Who, for the record, is an exceptionally good kisser.

If all this self-discovery fails, I still have the makings of a great middle school novel about an anxious girl with stomach issues and a questionable relationship with her mother.

Did you keep a journal as a child? Did you keep it? Even if you don’t have it anymore, tell me about what it looked like and where you hid it!

*Note the names in the diary entry have been changed to protect privacy.

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Journal with Me

It’s not too late to start a journal! Over the next few months, I’m planning to take you on a journey through my past as I read through my old diaries and journals. I’ll be using them as inspiration for memoir essays, fictional short-stories, and as a road map to figure out what I want to do next in this life.

I want to take you on this adventure with me, so I’m planning to share journaling prompts with you in the hopes that you can look to the past for keys to your future. Let’s remember what we wanted to be “when we grew up” and see if we can’t make it happen now.

This is a new perk for paid subscribers, so be upgrade to a paid membership to join in the fun.

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