An Unsettling Experience

Is there anything more uncomfortable than rereading old diaries?

I have been journalling consistently for about 15 months, but I have been trying to journal consistently for over 13 years.

The earliest ones don’t exist anymore, I burned them in a wastepaper bin in the back garden the night before I left home to go to university, too worried about what my mother might think if she ever cracked the cover of the little brown workbook I had confided in to worry about what parts of me I was destroying.

In hindsight I don’t think there was anything truly shocking in them, nothing my parents didn’t know or at least suspect so strongly they may as well have, but an 18 year old isn’t old enough to realise their parents are just people too, and notes about wet dreams and wanting to look cool and have money and blah de blah wouldn’t shock them.

I’m not sure they would find the more recent volumes as mundane.

The last few years have not been great, I’m happy to say I’ve made a lot of progress in some areas, but I still struggle in others.

I feel tired, more tired than I should, more tired than most of the people around me seem to be. Some of the things I have wrote over the last 15 months genuinely scared me when I read them again earlier this week, while tidying away some filled notebooks into storage.

How bleak my mood often is, how consistently cynical I’ve become, how often I report having issues with intrusive thoughts, with drink, with burnout, how often I go back to dwell on bad experiences, how often I question the motives on my friends.

How often I justify my own bad behaviour, or excorciate myself for monstrous failings that in hindsight were tiny pauses in what was otherwise a solid streak of progress¹.

Especially how rapidly and chaotically I seem to flip between different headspaces, from upbeat and hopeful to bitter to livid to completely flat, round and round, zigzagging between ennui and every other pretentious wanky word you can think of.

These periods must feel longer when I’m in them, with more space between them, and if I were to pause on an average day and try and score my mental state I would say fine, 4-6/10, but on the page, averaged over a year and a bit, it would seem I’m insane.

Weird,
I’m mad in aggregate.

Not everything in these books was bad, some of it was great, some of it was funny, a lot of it made me feel glad I had tried at the time, dozens of little victories I had forgotten about memorialised to be celebrated when I stumbled on them again.
But I hope the next time I’m putting notebooks away I have something more cheerful to read.