I began my first diary when I was 14. My mom was laid up from a bad car crash, my dad had died, and my sister’s health was precarious. In general, my home life was in the toilet, in need of a royal flush. Every feeling I had was pregnant with hormones, evidenced by the flock of zits on my forehead and my inability to get full night’s sleep.
The happy times of grammar school seemed like a distant blur, when all you had to do was go to school, study a bit and enjoy recess. Life was so simple then. Things were different when I entered my teens.
Thankfully, my diary became my life preserver. Perhaps my mum had given it to me, knowing my penchant for creative writing, thus providing me with an outlet for my vivid imagination.
New and shiny, it gave me a place to confess anything. And I did. There, I could park all my pent-up feelings, and self-doubts about being too tall, too poor, and having a home life that didn’t resemble Father Knows Best.
As I recall, it was Barbie-pink and girlie, and had one of those gold-plated locks with a small key so I could keep my secrets safe. Of course, I never locked it. I just stuffed it in the attic so my mum couldn’t find it.
I wrote in it almost every night when I couldn’t sleep, feeling guilty about being the only healthy one in my family. Why was I spared the ravages of nature when everyone else in my family was either in and out of the hospital, battling some sort of substance abuse, or flirting with the parameters of the law?
Inside I escaped my family problems by focusing on the rise and fall of boyfriends, classes, my developing sexuality, and all the minutia that plagues a young teenage girl. Was I developing fast enough? Should I wear nylons instead of Peds? Does Clearasil really work?
As I finished one diary, I would plough into the next, vomiting my daily arsenal of seemingly important issues. In high school, it was the now the early 1970s, so there was a fair amount of political banter, the incipient stages of free love, and a smattering of drug use. I dabbled in all of it.
I lost my virginity in diary number seven, and charted my departure from Studio City to the University of California Santa Barbara. There, my diaries would continue as I traversed the nuances of the Vietnam era, the ensuing bank burnings, and marching for many social causes. My attraction to woman raised its hormonal head, as I tried to hide my sexual preferences without much success with a litany of boyfriends.
I remember pushing off the advances of dates who forced themselves on me, and I was not always successful. Back then we just accepted these occurrences. Thankfully, we now have a name for this type of unwanted behaviour.
These diaries continued for decades, marking my entrance into the workforce with a smattering of temp jobs. Eventually, I realised I couldn’t use whiteout without spilling it all over the desk, and that my handwriting was no better than a physician’s scrawl.
I got out-of-office work and thankfully, I found a career in the world of advertising. My diary charted it all.
Soon, corporate life dominated the diary, with a litany of promotions, firings and office politics. All of it seemed so important at the time.
The scribbling continued to keep me afloat as I charted through years of corporate restructuring. At the time, I thought I was the only one going through this sort of thing. Now, it seems like everyone has a war story to share, especially if you’re nearing your 50th birthday, when you’re suddenly deemed too old, too expensive or both.
Ironically, when I got out of corporate life, my diary entries pretty much came to a standstill. Hmm …
The diaries are now scattered all over my condo like dead grenades. Inside each of them is explosive material, exposing my truths at the time, however trivial they may seem now.
Upon occasion, I’ll pick up a volume and try to re-read its contents. I laugh. Couldn’t I have come up with some profound entries? Why didn’t I predict the dawn of the Internet or a car that drives itself? Instead, they were just the usual drivel of a teenager’s growing pains.