What this Millennial learned from reading over her childhood diaries

Tucked away in a nook of my childhood bedroom is a secret store of boxes filled with mementoes. Ballet shoes, Beanie Babies, birthday cards, sticker albums; a folder of watercolour paintings; a shopping bag of notes passed in class, and a shoebox of diaries.

The oldest diary I pulled from the box had a dog-patterned front cover and a proper lock that once opened with a tiny key. I only wrote in the first few pages and each entry, beginning ‘Dear Diary’, had the same date written in pencil in the allotted field: Christmas 1999.

The funny thing about reading over the ramblings of your nine-year-old self is how differently you remember it all. You forget the brutal honesty of being nine and your one true desire is to gain access to the locked room that you know contains all the sweets and chocolate.

In one entry, I wrote about how much I loved the kid’s encyclopaedia I was reading at the time before suddenly exalting about my parents. In the next entry, I immediately complained about them.

As suddenly as it was said, it was concluded. No further thoughts on the matter.

That brief memoir was put aside to live on a shelf or in a box in my room for the next twenty years.

It wasn’t long before I started another diary in a new notebook, dating the entries between 2000 and 2001.

Dear Diary, I wrote. Me and my friend wrote a song called, ‘I lost my halo yesterday’.

The chorus went:

We weren’t singing about a particular topic that I can recall, nor did I note such detail in the diary. It seems that the main appeal was that the song rhymed, it was catchy and we were hopeful for our chance at Kylie Minogue-level fame or at least a television appearance.

I was a Pokémon fanatic and also wrote about the stickers I was collecting for an album. In fact, I loved Pokémon so much, I wrote out all the words to the theme song from the television series. This was before mobile phones or the internet had come to the masses so Pokémon and GameBoys were amongst the most modern entertainment outlets I turned to as a child.

And I wrote frequently about being bored. An entry from this diary describes how I was so bored that day, I cleaned my room, made ‘a bell’ (it hasn’t survived so no idea what form this took), a sign and I knitted. We did some knitting projects at school and the diary entries made it clear that my feelings toward it as a hobby were ‘meh’ but not for lack of trying.

When I did get a mobile phone, sometime in 2002, text speech began to pepper the ‘Dear Diary’ entries.

I had a habit of keeping multiple diaries at once which made trying to read them back in chronological order quite confusing. I picked up another notebook and jumped back to the year 2000.

I can’t remember which TV show, book or movie I got this from but I called this particular diary my ‘Bam Book’. The entries from this notebook, which had a picture of the cast from Friends on the cover, read like run-on-line, stream of consciousness. Sentences and sentences of detailed but matter-of-fact observations about my life and the happenings around me.

I describe 9/11 in this diary which was discussed all around me that day and amongst the students.

Another thing I’d forgotten about was how, if I saw a movie I really liked, I’d watch it every. single. day. Sometimes repeatedly. Around this time, I was obsessed with Grease and one of the diary entries includes drawings, similar to Before and After pictures you’d see now on Instagram, that were likely inspired by Sandy’s transformation at the end of the film. For ‘the old me’, I drew a woman in a long flowing dress with a smiling face and a bow-tied ribbon in her hair (which I definitely never wore) while ‘the new and improved me’ was cool, edgy and modern-looking, in a short dress and big hoop earrings.

In 2002, I started another new diary in which I wrote:

That January, Ireland had switched from using the Irish pound to the Euro.

I had seen Bridget Jones’s Diary and did a few entries like her’s, recording information like my weight, my height and how much money I had (€1).

My fiscal interests were focused on one particular savings goal: a Nokia 3310, my first mobile phone. But other big things were afoot. I was very excited about the new bed my parents had bought for me. The lower half had a built-in desk and shelves while a ladder lead to the bunk bed on top.

I also wrote about my pen pal, a girl I’d met on a holiday, putting her email address in her latest letter and cringed about the (field) hockey coach who had yelled at our team for playing badly.

I didn’t keep a diary in 2003 so there’s a leap in time in the notebooks up to 2004 when I was already in the thicket of the teenage wilderness; the years of boys being sooo cute and wtf is happening to my body; what do I even look like? Am I pretty? Am I not pretty? Who am I? Who are my friends?

Although I continued to date every entry, I stopped opening with ‘Dear Diary’ perhaps because I thought it was uncool or childish. Instead, the diaries I kept in the mid-to-late noughties are filled with scratchy, pen loops of raw teenaged angst.

It made me sort of sad observing myself transition from this quirky kid who wrote songs and read encyclopedias to a ‘poor me’ teenager. But I think this is mainly because as I got older, the diary changed function to become my agony aunt and outlet for my teenaged self-obsession rather than my friend whom I kept updated on my life and the world around me. The interest I had in books and games still float to the surface in these diaries but I focused more prominently on my relationships, my appearance, and my worries.

Until I re-engaged with the volumes of messy, fleeting thoughts produced by my pre-pubescent self, age had blurred everything and I had a very different sense of what it was like. My mind had re-written and re-framed the narrative of my life at that time and many of the thoughts and emotions that went with it had slipped from my consciousness.

Several influences intertwine in the pages of the diaries: movies, books, school, family, friends, technology and wider society as innocence drifts towards womanhood and a young girl tries to make sense of the world.

Perhaps I dated everything so meticulously, which seemed natural at the time, in order to have some form of retrospective communication.

I laughed reading the lyrics of ‘I lost my halo’ but it also gave me the tingles, to be honest. Although we had lost touch, the girl I wrote the song with sadly passed away when she was eighteen.

I do wonder what the diaries would have been like if I had grown up a bit later. Hop forward just a few years and maybe I would have been watching videos on YouTube when I was bored rather than making bells.

As I wrote this, I thought about whether we all products of our environment and I couldn’t settle on a yes or no answer. Somewhere, at the intersection between environment, individuality and the ageing process, there is, I think, something unique.

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