Is this any better than teenage diaries?
My parents came to visit at the weekend. They've turned my old bedroom into a study so my mum can work from home, and they brought some of my stuff that had been in a box in the bottom of my old wardrobe. Inside a tied up plastic bag I found my old teenage diaries. Oh God how embarrassing, I thought.
I kept a diary from 13-17, the early 1990s. Thinking about it, I guess these were not eventful action-packed books compared with the story of some people's lives but WHAP! Back come the memories of what it was like to be a teenage girl in a rural village hanging out with friends, just starting to have boyfriends, getting a Saturday job, squabbling with my brother, going to school etc.
I'm feeling quite old and tired now (effect of having a newborn baby with the next prospect of 8 hours uninterrupted sleep some years away) but I'm really surprised I DID so much: drama, orchestra (school and music school), choir (ditto), youth clubs (two on different nights), seeing friends, working on Saturdays, church on Sundays. I seemed to spend hours on the phone, with my family, watching TV, shopping etc.
I had a good trusting relationship with my family - I never had a lockable diary as I knew they wouldn't read it. Nevertheless, things I really didn't want anyone to read were written in code. I was amazed to find that now - around 15 years later - I can still read the coded entries without thinking.
I think the thing I love best is the sheer innocence, almost like the 1950s: numerous entries on eyemeets and snatched conversations with boys I fancied, my first kiss, the agonies of how and whether to photocopy and distribute an underground school magazine at the all-girls school I attended. Sex, drugs, cigarettes - these things happened to other people and didn't featured in my world: two still don't!
So what's all this got to do with anything? Well, blogging strikes me as a diary that anyone can read - not just an unlocked diary in the bedside table but out there for anyone anywhere in the world to see. This is my first blog entry ever, so I guess I'll figure it out as I go along. Is that any better or worse than a teenage diary? How much can you and should you say? And is there a need to write any of it in code?
PS this post was first published in my blog on thoughts.com, ww.thoughts.com/rose22/blog
