This post is five years in the making. To be completely accurate, it is five years and nine days in the making. On December 23rd 2008 I opened a Notepad file on my laptop and started to write about my day. The event that set me off was the messy capitulation of a high school romance; a break-up that I oddly owe so very much to, in hindsight. Every day from that moment on I would write an entry, some longer than others, in what would be called 'Diary of a Boy'. Between that youthfully painful day and the 27th of May last year I typed thousands upon thousands of words, as I mapped out four and a half very important years of my life.
Why do I come to you with this tonight? This post certainly wasn't planned but it was an inevitability from the moment that I stopped keeping my diary. Tonight I did something that I should have a few weeks ago. After stuffing myself full of pasta (which I do all the time) I opened up the most recent file ('Diary of a Boy - Year 5') to see how I was feeling this time last year. In case you are not aware of every detail of my life, I am currently writing an essay for university - a 6000-word sucker, of which I had three this time last year. I needed to see if I was feeling as crap as I am just now; I needed someone to tell me it was going to be OK.
I was pleased to see that I was feeling just as rubbish then as I do just now about the whole thing. In fact, I was feeling three times as bad last year and at this stage was yet to start my third essay - I'm comparatively on top of things just now! Good stuff.
Having read what I forced myself to seek out, I then spent the next hour scrolling through the various events, and the days in between, that marked the first five months of 2013. What amazed me more than anything else was just how little confidence I had only a matter of months ago, and how much better I feel about things today. There are so many little details about university and social events that I had forgotten until tonight; so many little lessons that, had I not taken time out before doing my dishes, I might never have remembered.
And there stands the true power of what I have put together over the last five years. If I want, I can remind myself exactly how I was feeling on any given day in that time. Who was I thinking about? What was I beating myself up about? When was I happy? What made me happy? When was I sad, and why? A map of my journey into adulthood, accessible in just a few clicks.
Why did I stop? From a practical point of view I think my working full-time from the 28th of May onwards in the summer didn't afford me very much time/energy to sit down and write. The entries would have been much the same every day anyway! From a more personal point of view, I think by that stage, having just come off the back of my exams, I felt like I didn't need my diary anymore. It served me well as a daily catharsis throughout the tricky years of high school and my move to university but I didn't feel attached to it any longer. Dare I say that 'Diary of a Boy' didn't fit anymore?
Those of you who have been reading my blog(s) over the years will know that this diary exists somewhere and you will be aware how much it means to me. Just because I don't record my personal thoughts in those files anymore does not mean that I haven't continued them elsewhere. I keep two notebooks - one at home, one in Edinburgh - where I write occasionally when I feel I need to get something out of my system.
It's important to be able to reflect on and remember both good and bad times, and I encourage you, if you don't already, to start to note down things. If you have the willingness to stick with it, I strongly encourage you to do it every night - it soon becomes second nature. Even if you only do it for a few months, then that will be a few months that you'll forever be able to place yourself back into and remember things that you otherwise would forget. The past is a beautiful thing: embrace it by doing something about it for the future.
I'm going to leave you with an extract from the Queen's Christmas message in 2013. Ashamedly I've never watched it before, and only came across the 2013 one as a suggestion on Youtube last week. Maybe I'll watch it again this year. Anyway these lines resonated with me and seem like an apt way to remember my remembering.
"We all need to get the balance right between action and reflection. With so many distractions, it is easy to forget to pause and take stock. Be it through contemplation, prayer, or even keeping a diary, many have found the practice of quiet personal reflection surprisingly rewarding, even discovering greater spiritual depth to their lives."Thanks for reading.
