A Not So Secret Diary

When I was 18 years old my very-soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend read my diary.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Writing in a diary was something I had been doing intermittently for many years, and this particular journal that he intruded on was where I had been trying to process how I felt about our relationship. I had been writing my raw and unfiltered thoughts on the good, the bad, and the downright confusing. At eighteen (and still now at thirty years old) I had a lot of feelings, and I found writing them down the best way to make sense of them. The things that he read were things that I never thought anyone would ever read. Maybe I was naive, or maybe I just needed to find a better hiding spot for my innermost thoughts and feelings.

I still have that diary he read, it sits in a box in the attic but the final entry isn’t mine. It’s not my handwriting and they are not my words; they’re his. The words are scribbled out beyond any comprehension, so I can only changed his mind about wanting me to read whatever he had written. A choice he took away from me, and then made for himself. I’ll never know what he wrote, and when I later read back my own entries, and saw them through his eyes, they no longer felt like mine. They felt different now.

That day altered something in my brain chemistry forever, and since then I have tried and failed to write in many diaries, many times. But I have never again been able to actually splurge my totally unfiltered thoughts onto a page. Even when I write about the most mundane, every day things, I find I am simultaneously reading it through the eyes of anyone who might stumble upon the words.

It creates a filter that isn’t always perceptible but it exists nevertheless. Maybe one day I will manage to remove it and I can leave behind diaries with pages wrinkled by time and raw, unfiltered words for future generations to pore over. But in the mean time I have found joy and purpose in writing words that I’m actively deciding to share with others. More than that, I have found so much connection in sharing my thoughts and feelings in a way that is as honest and authentic as anything shared can possibly be.

Words have power, and I think that by making the choice to share mine with anyone who cares to read them has been a way of me reclaiming some of my own power. I didn’t know this was a part of what I was doing, but it’s something I can now clearly see through the lens of hindsight. Writing a blog was a lifeline to me in the early years of motherhood. Processing my feelings and experiences through words pulled me through the hardest days. And sharing those words, and consequently finding connection with other mothers who really truly understood, gave me the closest thing I’ve known to a village. Pressing publish on a post was like throwing a rope and hoping that someone would catch the other end to save me from drowning in my own thoughts with their acknowledgement and understanding. It allowed me to feel seen in a season where I sometimes felt invisible even to myself.

I found even more connection and community on Instagram and my blog posts naturally evolved into long captions instead. And as the platforms have evolved so have I, and so has my content. I never set out to make content, I was just sharing my thoughts. The captions got shorter and the pictures became videos. I enjoy it for what it is, but I miss writing. It’s a muscle I haven’t properly flexed for a while and in the same way that I notice myself feeling sluggish when I haven’t been consistent with my Pilates workouts, I feel the effects of not writing too. And recently I’ve been feeling that deficiency acutely.

So that was the longest version of the short story which is this; I’m going to give Substack a go. It feels like a fresh start. It’s a blank page for me to quite literally do what I like with. And I’ve heard it’s a good place for community too. I can’t tell you what I’m going to write, because at this point your guess would be as good as mine. But I can tell you that I have thoughts I need to share and words I need to write. I can tell you that I am a thirty year old mum of two, who has so much figuring out to do and I plan on doing some of it here. In this not so secret diary. That no one can read without my permission, because when I press publish I give permission.

I hope you’ll subscribe and enjoy what I decide to write. But even if no one reads this, or future posts, I’ve enjoyed sitting here and writing it. It’s 11.30pm, the house is calm and I’ve got a lovely candle burning. I’ve also got pins and needles in my right foot because I haven’t moved for a while and my vinyl player is flashing a red light at me to let me know that I really should turn Tortured Poets over (again). So this feels like the right time to work out how to actually publish this.

Thanks for reading (if you did).