Originally Published in Print, April 2022.
Photo By Megan O’Rourke
Before there were ‘finstas’ and close friends stories, or Twitter accounts cum personal diaries, there were actual diaries. At around the age of 8, although my days were composed mostly of hopscotch and Muzzy Mór, I reckoned that the inner workings of my life were interesting enough to document. My diary has taken many forms since: from a butterfly-shaped spiral-bound notebook, to a royal blue A4 with an embroidered peacock on the front, all serving essentially the same purpose.
I have always relied on my diary much in the same way I would a counsellor, except diaries aren’t loaded with the expectation of reform or groundbreaking revelation. One of the chief benefits of keeping a diary is the space it offers us to simply be. Yes, it’s just lines on a page, but within those 6×8.25 inches lies prime real estate. After all, where else can we carve out room for such unabashed self-exploration? Arguably, your diary is best utilised as a litmus test for how awful a person you are, so why not take advantage of the opportunity to be wholly incoherent, to whine or confess or to be the bad guy in the story? Though you might offer your avid fans a peek at your morning routine via your Snapchat vlog, or divulge to TikTok, in excruciating detail, the first date that ended with a trip to Blanchardstown Hospital, it isn’t an unfiltered version of yourself. Rather, it is simply another manifestation of the fact that ours is a world which demands we perform; critically analyse, debate, hurl out ‘hot takes’ rapid fire. Rather than performing in front of your iPhone – and it is performing, despite how off-the-cuff and casual it may seem – committing your thoughts to pen and paper presses pause on the performance, lending breathing room to explore an unedited version of yourself.
In our world of constant oversharing, I think it has become all the more important to reserve private spaces for ourselves. To this day, I refuse to scrawl my name or address on the front page of my diary – it is something that feels inherently personal, precious in its banality. This commitment to privacy has resulted in most of my diaries becoming completely illegible, composed of scribbled out paragraphs, torn pages and cryptic names initialled in glittery silver ink. I know that at the time, it all seemed so significant: the English test in two days, the piano exam I was sure to fail, the party I was going to skip. Spats that got resolved in a matter of minutes were transformed into mini-sagas, playing out over five pages. Everything and nothing was happening, important enough to be documented at the time but so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that, in looking back over my teenage diaries, I wonder why I thought it had to be recorded.
That said, I am eternally grateful that it was. When we lost my older brother in 2020, I remember fervently rifling through all of my old diaries. I was searching for his name, any little snippet of our lives I decided to record – some of it so crazy it read as fiction, most of it mundane and heart wrenching in its mundanity. From uneventful to insane, those old diary entries are my very own coming-of-age script. They offer a snapshot of the person I used to be and the growing pains of becoming the person I am now. I can bookmark my girlhood, divide it into chapters which, as it turns out, are worth the read – scanning over the now yellowing pages serves as a reminder that it does get better. In documenting the minutiae of the everyday in such a pared back way, without filters or effects, we gain perspective on the geography of our lives, each entry connecting the dots to shape the contours of the self.
