diary

My whole life, I have struggled to keep a diary. It seemed too scary of an idea, to have all my vulnerabilities projected into cursive on a lined sheet of paper. When I was younger, I wasn’t able to do the work of being honest that having a diary requires, not even to myself out of fear that I wouldn’t like what I saw. But now that I have the self-esteem and self-awareness, I love writing in my diary and I love it even more when I can read what I have written and feel warmth. I can see the progression of a story where I am the protagonist of something, even if it is my own diary. Now, my diary has taped-in pictures, screenshots from text messages, and lines of my own handwriting documenting my life as I see it, a progression toward all the unknown lines that have yet to be filled in with tears and laughter and change and returns.

My alarm clock goes off faithfully at seven o'clock every morning. It’s usually when it's still dark outside, when streets are uncharacteristically quiet, and when pedestrians are, to my dreamy eyes, amorphous silhouettes. I crawl languidly out of bed, half-consciously grab my phone from the corner of my desk, and tap the Gmail icon on the screen that always has a red 100+ icon on its upper right corner. Each week, I receive emails from the same places: the Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Butler Circulation Desk, the newspapers that I subscribe to, my clubs, my classes, the minutiae of daily attendings—over and over and over again—until they all start to look the same.

Like any angsty, pre-teen girl growing up in Fairfield County, Connecticut, I read a lot of Sylvia Plath. I thumbed through “The Bell Jar” with a reverence that bordered on the religious and dog-eared my copy of “Ariel” until every corner of every page was creased. Mostly, though, I was captivated by her diaries. Plath’s diaries, which unravelled everything from human nature to “big, dark, hunky boy[s],” touched a raw nerve in my adolescent self. And so, of course, I bought myself one.