Diaries: How do we choose what we remember?

Diaries are meant to be a private and non-judgemental place to explore all of our convoluted thoughts and emotions by laying it all out on paper. They also provide a permanent record of our lives and our development as people. As someone who has been writing in a diary since 2011, I’ve looked back at my past diaries. I’ve laughed and cringed. 12 years later, now in my early 20s, I’ve started to reflect on what they mean to me.

As much as diaries are private and non-judgemental, there is still a sense of responsibility. We know that every story has more than one side but it seems more complicated here. Remember that stupid crush you had when you were younger? You might have thought that he didn’t know but you couldn’t have been more obvious. Remember the night of the Year 12 formal? We were together the entire night but there are different memories of it in each of our minds. Yet, the self-centred portrayal of stories in our diaries gives us the catharsis of ranting without feeling guilty about feeling that way in front of others. Even then, we may leave out some parts of our perspectives, knowing that we might regret it or cringe at it later on. 

I was recently looking through the diary I kept back in 2016, expecting to read about a certain dramatic incident that happened in high school. I flipped through the pages and couldn’t find it. I wondered if I was looking at the wrong period of time. I then realised that I was looking at the right month of the right year. I just didn’t write about that incident because I had wanted to forget about it instead of having a permanent record of it. 

While writing from our perspective, we are fuelled by our emotions. Sometimes, we cannot see right from wrong or we simply choose not to face the objective reality. What we write has been skewed in our favour so that we could feel better about ourselves in the moment but when we are emotionally removed from it in the future, we remember the specific memories and emotions and we may see that what we wrote was unfairly skewed. And if we don’t remember them? Then the one-dimensional narrative we originally wrote is forever ingrained in our memories. 

There are things that I wrote just two years ago that I have no recollection of and there are things from six years ago that I remember vividly. Looking back on my diaries through the years, I always go through a bittersweet rollercoaster of emotions and feel a sense of nostalgia. At the same time, there is a tendency to cringe at how I behaved and how I took in the world around me. Sometimes, reading it feels like someone’s strapping me down to my seat and forcing me to replay every moment in life that I’d like to forget. 

But from what I read, the things that I do remember weigh on my conscience because of how I wrote about certain people or events. I am challenged by different versions of the event. Writing in a flurry of emotions, there were times I deliberately chose to focus on how I felt wronged by someone even though, if I took a step back, I could see why that person did what they did. I would focus on how someone’s words made me feel even though I may have misinterpreted them. There’s a comfort in knowing how I felt at that time, in knowing what I was thinking. Even if I might have been wrong.