25 years ago I was not in a happy place. And as I mentioned in my previous journal extract I am not completely enjoying reading my 1992 diary. However, at least I can take comfort in the fact I had my diary to write in and clear my head of worries. I believe and hope this must have helped improve what was going on in my head at least at some level. This latest entry starts:
I am glad I have you at the moment as there is no one else I can talk to.
I didn’t write down the specifics of what I wanted to talk about, but from the rest of the post it is clearly connected to my friends. In summary, it seems I thought my friends preferred other people to me. They didn’t wait for me after lessons and would tell me to meet them places and not turn up. I obviously didn’t trust them because I dwas particularly concerned they would tell anything I told them to other people (and also that they shared things with other people instead of me).
Looking back on it now, I can easily see that most of my feelings come from my own insecurities. However, I also wonder if I would have been happier if I was not friends with these girls, because surely if it was this hard it was not a proper friendship. I mean is it healthy to resent your friends?
I am not going to tell them I resent them etc but I feel it all the same.
One thing I’ve learnt from reading these old entries is how important my diary was to me at the time, and how I relied on it to share my thoughts and concerns. Maybe this is a big reason why I still write a journal almost every day.
Your teenage diaries sound a lot like mine! I’m too scared to read back over them though! I found my diary really helpful as a teenager, I used to write loads every night before bed and it helped to clear my head, I definitely remember going over my friendship issues.. Now I write a much shorter diary and it’s about what I’ve been up to, I don’t write anything personal.
My diary is also shorter now. Most days it is a list of the good things from the day. I am trying out using morning pages as the time to clear my head.
Although it is not enjoyable to re read my diaries at the moment, I do get a feeling of progress made as I can tell I’ve come along way.