My Diary Holds My Heart Within Its Pages

Growing up was a little more bearable with a pocketbook companion.

How many people around the world have written these familiar words at the top of a blank page?

Dear Diary…

And the words that follow always come from the heart — no matter how silly or serious they may be.

KiKi Walter started a hilarious series of diary entries that are set in 1984. There’s drama, nostalgia, snort-inducing commentary, and more. Many other people on Medium wrote their own fun diary entries, myself included.

But it also got me thinking of how I used my own diary. Of how I pressed into my pain within its pages.

I kept a diary from the ages of seven to thirteen. I literally used every square inch of paper in that book. I didn’t leave a single page blank. No stones in the story of my life were left unturned.

I recently fished it out of my closet and read all of my entries again.

It starts off innocently enough, as anything written by a seven-year-old would. I wrote about my day, my teachers, things that happened at school. Any fun family trips I took or something that made me happy was eagerly documented.

But when I hit puberty, the pages started looking pretty bleak.

I was an awkward, introverted kid and never felt like I fit in. Much of my childhood was spent feeling lonely and with my head buried in a book.

Peer pressure was not kind to me. I went to a tiny Christian school — there were 500 kids in it total, from kindergarten to grade twelve. When I made it clear to my classmates that I was determined to march to the beat of my own drum, it was a swift popularity death sentence.

Any friendship I cultivated when I was younger followed suit. I expressed my frustration, hurt, and anger at seeing close friends bend to fall in line with a popular crowd in my diary.

Looking back at what I’d written, the hurt I felt when I was ostracized by my peers is so prevalent.

You can just see teenage me banging on invisible walls in heartache, while I continued building walls of my own to protect myself from being hurt again.

It’s no wonder I found solace in words on a page. Writing became my escape, my way to vent.

Words wouldn’t change before my eyes and become someone I no longer recognized. They wouldn’t shapeshift into a snake that would bite me later.

Some of the words I wrote during that period of my life are still hard to read.

They remind me of a time when I would try my hardest to make connections with people in my life, only to experience disappointment and heartache each time I tried to be vulnerable.

I stopped using the term, “best friend”. I had given that title to many people in my childhood and found out that they were in fact, not my best friend, and only there for a season. Some of them were the exact opposite of a best friend, and belittled me every chance they got.

There were many nights when I cried myself to sleep.

It took an extremely long time for me to find a best friend that stuck. I finally found her in eighth grade, and I noticed that the diary entries stop there.

She was a good one, since we’re still friends to this day. Perhaps in finding a dear friend, I was finally able to let my pen rest. I am happy to be vulnerable with her now and let her carry a part of me with her.

In addition to that period of loneliness and bullying I experienced, I also wrote an embarrassing amount about my first crush.

There are literally pages of me swooning over him. I cringed the entire time I read these entries and couldn’t even bring myself to finish reading some of them. Why did I document conversations we had like they were dialogues from a soap opera?? Baby B clearly had her head in the clouds.

But that diary is a time capsule of a girl who didn’t know she could love herself yet.

It’s a diary of someone who presented herself to a world that wasn’t ready to accept her.

A love letter of anguish that documents the hills and valleys that she needed to go through to reach her peak.

An embarrassing, awkward moment in time captured in ever-evolving penmanship (and with a grand total of 10,000 spelling mistakes).

My diary holds my heart within its pages. And I wouldn’t rewrite a single word.

I actually wrote a story about one of those friendships that went sour. You can read it here: