I kept a journal throughout my teenage years. I didn’t tell anyone - I doubted that my pals would understand, without mocking me about doing something they’d have seen as girly and teasing me about sparkly pens and frilly padlocks.
It wasn’t girly though. It was ‘writery’ - a kind of practice pad for learning how to use words to express myself. I’d buy a desk diary, sometimes they were massive, and a proper handwriting pen, and then every night I’d write about how I was feeling about everything. In hindsight it was a fantastic way to get to sleep. I didn’t realise how good it was for me at the time - even though most of what I wrote was kind of nonsense.
It’s probably also the reason I started doing this 11 years ago too! For blindingly obvious reasons, this blog is nowhere near as personal as my teenage journals - but it serves the same sort of purpose. It extracts the nonsense from inside me and then I scribble it somewhere outside of me. And there has been a lot of nonsense.
This is post number 2491. It’s a lot of content. It’s a lot of life! And, now that I think about it, it’s a lot longer than my teenage late-night ramblings! At some point, at university I think, I just stopped doing it, leaving that stack of old desk diaries to gather dust in my parents’ loft. Coded messages, cryptic comments about friends, mimicking the style of my favourite authors, deep and angry, quirky and innocent. I’ve got plainer, I suppose, but it doesn’t feel like too much has changed.
So, 11 years today of this online silliness. Had I been a teenager, I might have done it all through TikTok. In fact, even since I started this in 2013, the art of journalling and blogging has steadily moved in that direction. This feels rather old-fashioned.
But that suits me, doesn’t it?
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