I've been writing diary entries since i was 8. I still am now, and I'm 15. (ahem inside joke ahem). and over the past month of me being overly-attached to a friend, I realized that diary entries are somewhat the giver of my happiness but yet the culprit to my pain.
when i was 8, all i wrote in my diary were literally the things I did that day.
e.g "I slept over at Abegail's house and when we woke up we fed her cat." lol.
but as I grew up, the content of my entries in my first diary named Mylo (I name my diaries. I thought that it was too mainstream to be writing "dear diary" all the time. So instead i wrote "dear Mylo" or "hello Mylo") started to change. It was from doing daily activities, to having a crush, to having been crushed by my crush, so on and so forth. But that was when I was 11.
I wrote to Mylo until 2012 when I was 12. I stuck with him for 4 years until I had to change my diary cause he ran out of pages (oops).
I up(down)graded my diary to a much smaller one, named Precious.
Precious was great, although I dint write to her every single day. I mostly wrote to her when something good happened that day, or that time of the year. I grew so attached to Precious that i could spend 6 pages writing about a trip back to the Philippines. Then I slowly (really slowly) realised that i could spend 6 pages because I wanted to remember that, or those, moments very clearly.
Writing to Precious wasn't really an obsession. But since I was growing, a lot of things started to happen. When I was in doubt, I wrote to Precious. When I was in pain, I wrote to Precious. When I had a weird dream, I wrote to Precious.
A few weeks ago I decided to read her like a novel. I decided to read all of my past entries and I noticed a hella lot of things.
Firstly, I wrote a lot about people. They all had something in common for their own individual entries; "I'm glad to have him/her in my life."
Secondly, if I wanted to remember a moment, I could spend a whole hour writing about it. Each and every detail. This happened so often this year, that I could spend 10 full pages writing about what happened in those 30 minutes of moments. And I would write about the sad, the happy memories I spent. Everything.
Initially I thought that writing these memories would be good as I thought that "oh, two years down the road I'll read this again and remembering all of these memories like they only happened yesterday." Then amidst all of those thoughts, something struck me. Like what I said in previous posts, "the best memories hurt the most."
After writing all of these moments I realised that I was just internally killing myself.
All those happy moments spent with someone special to you written down wouldn't be so happy after something affects the party, and when you read all those moments again you're stabbing yourself.
I have not fully stopped writing to Precious, but I indeed learnt that if I would want to write something, I would want to make sure that they stay happy and I won't be affected by those words I've written when I read them again 10 months down the road.
Many memorable things still happen. I just have to tell myself that I wouldn't regret writing such a wonderful memory down, only to be shunned by it when something affects the relationship between me and another party.
Diaries are still great to keep. You just have to be really careful about what you write.
@maryxtinylamb
