Dear Diary...

There is something about that phrase that just feels ridiculous to me.

As a young girl, I always had a little journal with a flimsy lock hidden in my room somewhere.  If you had sneaked into my room, found my hiding place and cracked open the lock, you would have discovered a startling truth:  It was empty.

What you would also have noticed is that there were several pages missing.  Why were there torn out pages, you might ask?  Maybe that’s where all the juicy gossip was written? Were the torn pages hidden somewhere else? Um, no.

The boring truth is that it never existed at all.  There were no heartfelt confessions, no damnation of my parents and no testimony of backstabbing to be had.  I would sit on my bed, with pen in hand and the best of intentions, and prepare to pour my heart out.  In my finest handwriting I would begin “Dear Diary,” and then I would just stop and stare at the page.  What was I supposed to write next? 

It was that next sentence that was always the hardest.  Seeing as the perfectionism started early, even at that age, I could never land on a sentence that I was satisfied with.  At times I managed to get one or two written before inevitably hating what I wrote.  Since I couldn’t just scratch out the offending words because that would look sloppy, I had to tear out the whole thing and start over.  Hence the missing pages.

Some days I would complete an entire entry, lock the journal away, and then bask in the accomplishment.  That is, until I revisited the letter in my head.  I would always find a better way of wording things or wish I had/hadn’t included something.  So back to the journal I would go and into the trash another piece of paper would reside.

Since the whole process was more hassle than it was worth, I quickly quite trying.  I learned to express myself in other ways.  I would sketch drawings in leftover spiral notebooks, write poetry, and in high school I started writing one-act plays and dialogue.  This ended up being, for me, the therapy that journaling can be for others.  It wasn’t until I was contemplating this blog entry that I realized that was me journaling all along.  It just so happened that my version wasn’t chronological, it wasn’t in one secure location, and it wasn’t always written out in words.

The blog is the 21^st century version of the diary and, now that I am older, I am willing to give it another try.  Sentences come easier now so I think I can handle it.  I fully realize that I tend to be a little verbose but I am working on that, too. It seems I have gone from one extreme to the other.  Hopefully this exercise will help me become more succinct as I learn to choose my words more precisely. I don’t know what will happen.  I think it will be ok, though, as long as I never have to start with “Dear Diary” again.