I am an Archivist at Heart.

My pink journal from ten years ago is the proof.

Jan 31, 2025

“What were you writing?” My friend asked as we were leaving the plane.

I just shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t really sure how to answer that. He said he understood.

For as long as I can remember, I have been writing in my journal. It has been an intense, beautiful, eye-opening experience. It doesn’t carry the strange, loaded diary of ‘dear diary’ that most people associate with flimsy girlhood or hearts dotting the i’s. It’s not even really a diary, per se. The answer to his question was, I was writing a myriad of things. What the sky looked like outside the window - balmy, coating our seats in dreamlike sun; our friend sat by the window, what her perfume smelt like and how I could slightly feel her toe dangling against my leg; about him (the one who asked) sat on the other side of me, the scratch of his pencil on his sketchbook, the whimsical characters he was creating. I wrote about how tired I was and the old couple I saw holding hands while riding their respective bikes. I wrote about how it felt to descend through the clouds and how it was probably one of the most gorgeous things I’d witnessed.

This was last October, the first time I’d been abroad without my family, and certainly the farthest place I’d been with my friends. It was a new experience for me, and with shock I found that what replaced the squidgy, familiar feeling of homesickness was actually excitement. That week, my journal was littered with exhilaration. How do I describe that to him?

I have been journaling consistently for more than ten years. On banal days, I write about the events of the day, of course, and I write about my thoughts, I detail the people I see on the train, I tell my diary about the doe I saw from the window. In some ways, I am speaking to myself - it is a long monologue, an introspection, a way of putting down the gallery of thoughts in my head into regimented lines - perhaps slightly idiosyncratic. It is a method of making scenarios and musings digestible.

Recently I made the harrowing journey to my loft. I was there for some boots for a hike - certainly not for what I found; a box I’d stuffed up there for safekeeping. In it, nestled safe and sound, was my first ever diary. I sat there, legs crossed, head bowed to avoid hitting the stuffy triangular roof - my body too large to sit here comfortably - surrounded by suitcases and dust and my brother’s old schoolbooks, cradling this pink diary with a timid padlock that half-heartedly held loose pages together. Years ago, I wrote in this everyday. The last time I touched it, I was entirely different, rapt with an insouciance that came from nothing other than childishly, determinedly, knowing who I was at that time. I did not know when I would next pick it up, when the dust would clear, when it would be opened with the small key that I knew was safe and sound in a trinket tray all these years.

I took it to my room. On the front - two illustrated girls with their arms around each other. Wiped the dust with my sleeve. Carefully turned the key and heard the click. I’d hooked a shell charm on the padlock and it slipped off as I opened the diary - as did a lot of papers, suddenly let loose and brought to light.

I was in awe. My handwriting was staggeringly different - it held a sort of amusing, blissful naïveté that was simultaneously afraid to look messy but was also utterly energetic. My way of thinking was different. The pages were pink. Sometimes, even the pen was pink. I was never really a ‘girly-girl’ but something about this diary had obviously appealed to me. It was obviously loved. Flicking through I felt a strange mix of admiration and grief. The entries detailed pieces from various scenes of my primary school life, right through to my first year of high school. I’d written about what I’d received for my birthday, what I was doing that weekend, where my family and I had gone for a day out, even about my first crush - who I was convinced liked me back (I was determined to show this in a very sensible pros and cons chart (apparently, I am not so different than I am today, for I have used my current journal to do the very same thing)). With shock I noticed diary entries scribbled with the names of my first friends at high school - friends who are household names now, who I’ve known for seven years. It was surreal to see where it all began, to watch my personality slowly cultivate itself. There is no schism. I did not wake up suddenly and decide to mature into the more defined version that I am now. The changes were gradual and slow and monumental and satiated.

The rest of my journals are kept under my bed. They are in a haphazard stack of yearning and lamenting and rejoicing over the smallest things to the largest, from a child to 19 years old. Through journaling, I found my best way of introspection. Through journaling, I can track my growth, how I am coming in to my own, the very life experiences that catalysed this. Journaling has been my greatest way of knowing myself.

This is why I will continually recommend journaling to any friend who struggles with… well, anything. As well as being entirely fascinating, it’s fun. It is less of a chore to do it everyday and more something that I look forward to. I can dissect the day’s conversations, perform autopsies on my problems, scribble down new knowledge I acquired, muse over my friends and my projects and how I look and whether that jumper fit me right.

There is a constant desire to perform in our society. Everyday we are bombarded with strangers we don’t know, strangers who we feel are watching us - how we walk, how we eat, how we dress, how we take a sip of coffee as we navigate the busy street. Everyday feels like a performance.

But the truth is, there is no audience. There is no stage. There is only you. The curtains are closed, the music has died down. The dust will settle on these moments, and soon you will forget that they even happened. That is, until they are immortalised forever in your own handwriting. It bears so more intimacy than a photograph.

I am an archivist. My journals are evidence of this. I am a collector. My common place notebooks are evidence of this. My scribbled-down memories, my scraps of fact, my visions of another reality, my crumpled receipts from restaurants that time my friends and I visited, that daisy chain that one of them absent-mindedly made on the grass outside the library, which I scooped up when he wasn’t looking. The sweet wrapper that I shared and didn’t throw away, the coin that we found on the ground, the piece of handwriting of my friend’s that I had for some reason salvaged from scrap pieces of paper in a classroom. Together with my mess of scribbles and my thoughts, this miasma of rambunctious ‘rubbish’ is actually evidence of my life, evidence of who I am, who I have encountered, and the places I’ve wandered to. They have become my own novel of my own life - evidence that I exist, that my identity exists, that my experiences exist outside of the tainted memories I have. And there is something inherently intimate and romantic about them, a sort of whimsy and magic I feel when I touch these palimpsests - clipped and tied securely to the creamed pages of a notebook that I will open next year and feel the past surrounding me in the ether when it comes back to life. Back to life through my own words; with an outlook that was the quiddity of the age I was.

Maybe I simply have a fear of forgetting, and that is what drives me to this urgency to document and keep my memories safe, forever. But I wouldn’t wish for anything else. It is worth it, when I read a diary entry from my highschool years and suddenly remember, in detail, a memory I had entirely forgotten with an old school friend who I loved but haven’t spoken to since. It is worth it, when I see the naivety leaking from my old diaries, from the very handwriting and the treatment of the pages to the soft doodles in the margins that begin to crop up.

My journals are me, performing for no one, writing for no one, simple writing for the sake of writing, writing every thought I have, whether well-articulated or not, and writing knowing that the older version of me is reading it fondly, sometime in the future. Journaling is the clearest form of communication. It is a way of transcending time and space.

I tried to assemble pages from my journals that felt like they captured the essence of the era (without revealing too many of my secrets). This was my own little curating/archivist/researching deep dive! Of course, it isn’t entirely accurate since I very well couldn’t post entries that may be construed. The last photograph is actually the entry that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay.