Content Note: This article contains discussion of the coronavirus lockdown.

If there’s one thing better than writing a diary during these strange times, it’s unearthing your adolescent scriptures to remind yourself of the awfully profound, embarrassingly naïve fourteen-year-old you once were. Alongside the lockdown-induced pressure to produce and create, we’re also afflicted with this communal, chronic introspection. Without an influx of new experiences, we are rinsing out old pre-pandemic memories, hoping that the bank of ‘before’ doesn’t run dry.

Having kept a diary religiously throughout my early teens, I’m theoretically well-stocked for the time being. Except for the small caveat that all of my immortalised angst is now unbearable for me to read. But, on a recent zoom call to my friends, I found myself reading extracts aloud in one of our desperate attempts to find new ways to entertain ourselves.

“Perhaps, a diary is the only way we can preserve the ugly parts of ourselves.”

It was the most fun I’d had in weeks – admittedly a masochistic sort of fun. If you’re willing to sacrifice your dignity to cheer up your friends, then I propose that you share yours too. Perhaps shrinking from the outside world will seem marginally more inviting afterwards.

As much as I’d have liked my old diary to read like a pleasant scrapbook of memories, it made for a much grittier and authentic account. Personally, writing has always been a cathartic release, so my diaries are overwhelmingly biased towards negative experiences. They were the deathbed of all my pent-up frustrations and anxieties.

I’d detailed the agony of first love that wasn’t really love at all, the truer heartbreak of family fallout, the nihilism. Perhaps, a diary is the only way we can preserve the ugly parts of ourselves. We don’t cherry pick our best days or filter the mundane, it’s all there - the jealousy, the rage and the injustice. It’s scribbled and turbulent and hard to look at.

“Diaries lend themselves well to times like this, giving us space to record the tension of noiseless days”

That said, diaries aren’t truly uncensored streams of consciousness. Reading over old passages has made me realise that I had omitted some parts and embellished others. There were sections that felt self-conscious – parts I’d changed because I wanted the truth to be different, and I thought I could fool myself into remembering differently. I regret the lapses in honesty, where I’d conjured a rosy, idyllic narrative that wasn’t mine. But, subconsciously, I think we all write our diaries to be read.

Diaries lend themselves well to times like this, giving us space to record the tension of noiseless days that would otherwise slip through the cracks. After a long break from journaling I’m tempted to start writing again. Not to chronicle the period we are living through, but because of the boredom that pushed me to confront those pages I’d been so scared to look at. To be able to remember something in its fullness, even if the truth is unpleasant.

Years later, I might shriek with riotous laughter at the anecdotes I write today. Time has given me the license to mock the weaknesses that I once confessed. As if any amount of time could erase the awfully profound, embarrassingly naïve fourteen-year-old who I know will always stay with me.