Secrets & Words

When I was a kid, I made an early habit of keeping a diary. I started because, like so many other things, when I asked my mom "Why?" she explained, between her furious scrawling, that it was "good for you." I also developed an early habit of taking things people said very literally. For instance, when I was six, I overheard a friend of my parents' turn down an offer for a beer, saying: "I don't drink." Phenomenal decision! I thought. If only I had known all along that drinking was a choice, I could have saved myself a lot of time! So it was only natural for me to want to grow up doing what was good for me, like eat my vegetables, play in the sun, and keep a diary.

Every new book was a whole new person, in my eyes--a person to whom I needed to acquaint myself over time, be polite, and make false promises. Every first diary entry would begin with me explaining who I was and what I planned to do on those pages: My name is Rebekah, I'm in fifth grade, and I have a crush on Ian, but he doesn't go to my school. I'm going to write in you every day and I promise you are the only diary I will every write to, and I will never write to another diary, not ever.

When each notebook was nearly full, I would be overcome with a sense of anxiety and The Dread of Completion, where I'd become so aware of the end of the relationship I had built that all I could think about was how to end it faster. I'd purposely increase the size of my handwriting for a few pages just to get on with the whole thing. Maybe it was like the young diary-keeper's version of I'll leave you before you can leave me. That diary's dwindling lack of space for my secrets and words was a direct insult to the amount of time I'd invested in creating that diary's whole inanimate but nonetheless very thorough personality. Not fair. The more I wrote, the more personality the diary had, and the less available it was for more of me.

In the final moments of the final page, the remorse would hit me, and I'd frantically try to diminish my scrawl, but to no avail. The diary was Dead. Done. Over. Finito. And then I knew I'd have to throw it away. Because there were no more blank pages left. And the whole point was to make sure that you filled up all the pages.

It took me a few more years to figure out that I didn't have to throw my diaries away once they were full--I could fill them up and keep them. Then, it took me a few more years to realize that filling them up and keeping them was really the whole point, after all. And then another decade or so to understand that I also didn't have to do that, either--I didn't have to fill them all up and then carry them around with me everywhere I went. I could throw them all away again. And then fill them up. And then throw them away. And then fill them up again. And again. And again. And again.