Diary: Life Before Blogging

Has anybody ever thought about keeping a diary? I mean those days when you were younger, you had a small book stashed away somewhere nobody would ever find and read what you thought about the world.

I did once, back in primary school dayz. In fact, I had several stacks of various forms of kid journalism; notebooks, exercise books, slips of paper, even a cassette tape.

But I quitted a few times, either because Arsenal and MySis always finds them and tease me about it or I just lost interest due to an unbelievably innocent boredom.

Whole-heartedly, I liked the concept of journals. It’s one of the most cost-effective methods of recording pieces of what life had passed by as you get older, worldlier. You can’t take things with you when you die but you can leave something behind.

Almost all my pieces of childhood are gone now, thrown away ages ago due to insecurity. Really, the things I write about that had awed me at the time would be a really big embarrassment if anybody finds it (like how I panicked on my first period).

So there’s kind of a void during the secondary school dayz. Grow up, meet guys, fail algebra... just blurry details.

There is one thing though.

I’ve made something like a letter to my future self. I think I was 18 or 19 years old when I wrote this letter and stuck it inside this Guide for Writers book. I hadn’t touched it since.

I have some vague memories of its contents. Something about friends in secondary school who had left for overseas, my SPM results and yes, the book project I had been working on (though it had changed and reshaped many times since then).

It’s still in there, mainly because my evil siblings, Arsenal and MySis, had long since outgrew sneaking into their baby sister’s room and prying through her stuff.

I don’t know how long before I want to open it and read again what I’ve written, maybe in another 5 years or so. It’ll probably be embarrassing, it’ll probably nostalgic, it’ll probably be... I don’t know, maybe really sweet.

Maybe that’s why I blog.
To be able to read back and say, “Oh crap, that wasn’t how I wrote it!”
And then laugh about it.

Life always tells us to open our minds to others and listen with our hearts. In finding others.

Diaries, I suppose, is life teaching us to do the same to ourselves. In finding ourselves.