Writing a diary requires being ever so slightly narcissistic. It also requires a tendency to overthink – the compulsion to relive and record your life and the lives around you. Re-reading your old diary entries, though, is taking it up a notch. As Gwendolen in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest says: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Whilst my own teenage journals are marginally less salacious than Gwendolen’s, (or Wilde’s, for that matter) from time to time I feel a gnawing urge to re-read. Why? Perhaps it’s a self-obsessed instinct, or a self-flagellating one. It might also be a need for reassurance, in times of stress, that I have lived through something similar before. A cursory Google reveals an internet full of people extolling the benefits of revisiting the pages of your journals, deeming it an invaluable learning experience. So when the desire to re-read arises, I admit I acquiesce. But is this always for the best?

For those of us who re-read books, re-reading old diaries might seem like a natural progression. Returning to a book you’ve already read is a secure comfort, a known entity. Some might argue that re-reading a diary is the same. Whilst this can arise when re-reading entries about resolved situations or past phases, I’ve found that revisiting old diaries lacks the sense of finality we may find in books. does not have a book’s sense of finality. Our lives have yet to reach their final pages (if we’re lucky, this is only the prologue) and sometimes revisiting old chapters only serves as a reminder that the ending is entirely knowable.

There is an argument that such an activity is reflective and helps you see how far you’ve come. Looking at your diary as a whole might offset the element of myopia that writing it can foster. Diary-writing gets us bogged down in the minutiae of a moment, so the process of re-reading can provide some much needed critical perspective. It’s also embarrassing. Unbearably so. In my experience, one may venture to an old journal in an attempt to relive the past, only to find themselves regretting not only past actions, but the way one wrote about them. It is humbling to relive the moments you were embarrassed by, but also to reevaluate the ones you weren’t. Sometimes it’s only in retrospect that we realise our errors. Take my entry on 1st January 2020, which read, “I have a feeling 2020 is going to be a good year”…. So, can re-reading your diary ever be beneficial, or are some pages better left to gather dust? 

In an interview with The New Yorker, Stevie Nicks said she “would rather spend the time writing a new journal entry than going back and reading old journal entries, because if you go back you’re not going to go forward.” This seems to be the common refrain against re-reading: it prevents you from evolving past who you were when you wrote the entries. Far be it from me to disagree with Stevie Nicks – certainly, her diaries would be more fun to re-read than my own – but it also seems like an oversimplification. The act of writing a diary in itself requires going back. The lag between thought and page (the mind-Moleskine gap, if you will) means that anything transcribed is necessarily in the past. Even if you attempt to jot down a stream of consciousness, no one’s pen can quite keep up with their brain. Therefore, writing a diary is already travelling back in time. To me, this is its beauty. 

Time seems to stop when you write in a diary. On the face of it, it is writing about the past, but it is also an acknowledgement of the exact present moment that this reflection is existing in. All those who start their entries with the date and time subconsciously acknowledge this. Writing a diary is being in three different times at once. To write a diary is to ‘go back’ precisely so that you might ‘go forward’. It is to unscramble your present thoughts about the past in the hopes that they might not be quite so chaotic in the future. It is also to acknowledge that we are not always moving forwards in life. In re-reading my diaries, I’ve discovered periods containing several entries on the same monotonous worry, or passages recollecting old embarrassments. Diaries acknowledge the importance of past and future, with the ultimate aim of letting us settle into the present. 

In the same interview, Nicks said that her diary is so hefty as to resemble “a telephone book, because I always feel that that will never get lost.” Personally, I favour a smaller vessel, but it seems to me that all diaries are telephone books in a way: a collection of various characters we knew at one time or another. Re-reading a diary is a way to get in contact with the litany of past selves contained in its pages. But, like a telephone book, you’re unlikely to use it all – I doubt you’re about to call that one number from a group chat you never actually met. So is keeping a diary an illusion of contact with your past self, then, unless you re-read it? 

In her renowned essay ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, Joan Didion wrote that “we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be […] Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m.” When I first re-read my old diaries, I believe this is what I thought I was doing. I was nostalgic, sure, but opening up my first diary from when I was fifteen was also an instinct to get ahead of those twinges of shame which resurface in the middle of the night. When I went back and looked at my old diaries to write this piece, I found multiple entries annotated with embarrassment: arrows with ‘lol’ or ‘cringe’ next to poems or confessions (which were, admittedly, very cringeworthy). Re-reading could be a way of helping us ‘keep on nodding terms’ with our old selves, but also kinder terms. It reminds us not only of our past actions, but how we rationalised them or felt about them. However,  just like it might not be wise to call everyone in your contacts, there might be some past selves that we don’t need to revisit so often, or so willingly. Some past selves require a level of critical distance I fear I will not have for many decades to come. 

So maybe one day it will be a good idea for me to re-read my diary entries, but until I have evolved far enough past the selves that exist on my pages, going back and re-reading can be an ensnaring habit, and one not always justified through the lens of ‘reflecting’. But, at the end of the day, at least if someone ever reads my diaries (and, let’s be honest, we all assume that one day someone will) I will be prepared for whatever they may read – I’ll have read it all already.