talking to myself: a look into my diary

putting hannah in conversation with hannah

There is a document on my laptop simply entitled “brain dump” (stylized in all lowercase) that I created in late summer 2018. It has now reached a whopping 693 pages and contains 283,218 words. It started out as a place for me to aimlessly type when I was bored during class. Over the years, it has morphed into a beloved companion. It contains practically every thought I’ve ever had since my freshman year of high school: the good, the bad, and the off-putting. Maybe especially the off-putting.

It almost goes without saying that I do my most authentic writing in there — there is no audience, and therefore no fear of being criticized, and therefore no pressure to be good or even coherent. No topic is off limits, which means that it is TOP-SECRET. You truly could not offer me enough money in the world to let you read it in full. If anyone ever got their hands on it and distributed it to the public, I would have to drastically alter my appearance, legally change my name, and move to rural Ireland to live amongst the sheep. All that being said, today I will be allowing you to look at multiple selected excerpts from it.

Note: not all of it is scandalous or even interesting. Because I write in it every single day, a lot of it — I daresay most of it — is stuff like this:

It’s 8:47 AM. My coffee is so delicious.

- November 29, 2022

I’m realizing now that, if my diary did get published, most people would probably get bored and give up on reading it before getting to any of the juicy stuff anyway. But these banalities are important, because they collectively make up so much of my life. Many of the entries are dull and repetitive, detailing things like what I have to do in a given day or what I ate for dinner the previous night. This is what makes it an honest examination of my existence, rather than just a highlight reel.

Even when I do acknowledge important milestones, the focus is usually not so much on the event itself, but rather how said event made me feel. For example, let’s revisit what was going through my head on my first day of high school:

I miss everything about middle school. I feel like I’ve been plunged into a tank full of sharks that I can’t see, so I’m just wildly thrashing and swimming around trying not to get eaten, but not knowing where the sharks are that are going to eat me. Does that make sense? It’s like my teachers and my classes are the sharks, and I’m watching and waiting for them to attack me and drag me down. I don’t want to fail. I really, really, really don’t want to fail.

- September 7th, 2018

When we talk about our pasts and our younger selves, it’s easy to blend memories together into a big block of time, not grasping onto any details, therefore making it easier to trivialize things. I can poke fun at the girl I used to be — how overdramatic I was; how hyperbolic; how young. I worried so much about nothing, and, dear God, how could I have missed middle school? What was there to miss about it?! But when I read this again, it grounds me in what I was feeling at the time that I wrote it. I feel its intensity, its immediacy. No matter how mature I think I am now, no matter how overblown I now find this shark simile to be, that doesn’t detract that this is how I felt back then, at age fourteen, sitting in the school library between classes. If I hadn’t written it down, I would have forgotten that feeling entirely, and it would be much harder to empathize with it.

It’s almost as if, while writing it, I knew that it would be looked at again someday, and, in fact, I wanted it to be. In the middle of my monologue, I break the fourth wall and appeal to some invisible pair of eyes: Does that make sense? Who am I talking to? When I wrote it, it was a rhetorical, unanswerable question — a shout into the void. Now, it’s a call from the past, and I can actually answer it. Yes, it does.

a peek at the process, occurring in its natural habitat (Green Dragon)

I do this sort of thing a lot in my diary. The purpose of a diary is to document things, and the purpose of documenting things is so that you can remember them. While I’m writing in it, there’s always a dim awareness that I’m preserving something, and that someday I might revisit it. The benefits of a typed diary over a physical one are the most evident when I am able to equip the “Command + F” function to search for some key word or phrase that may crop up multiple times, scattered haphazardly throughout the lengthy manuscript. One of these phrases is “future Hannah,” which I have used 13 times. This is the most direct reference to the reader: myself.

If future Hannah is reading this and you can’t remember who I’m talking about, too bad. I’m not writing his name in this document . . . If he becomes my boyfriend I’ll maybe, maybe write his name down. But you should know who I’m talking about, future Hannah. If you don’t, shame on you for not remembering every single detail about my life. You should care more about yourself. 

- October 25, 2019
(Note: he did not become my boyfriend.)

As demonstrated by the above example, quite a few of the statements directed towards “future Hannah” actually have to do with things I don’t want to write down, like extra-sensitive information or unpleasant memories I can’t bring myself to recount. This is further proof of my diaristic endeavors being an act of preservation: I am always aware that documenting something immortalizes it to some degree, and sometimes, that just feels too permanent. Instead, I entrust it to the flimsy, unreliable vessel of memory, passing it on to an iteration of myself that doesn’t yet exist, hoping that she can hold onto it.

Except: now that iteration does exist. Anytime I go back and read a post addressing “future Hannah,” it’s no a longer mysterious and intangible entity, because now it’s me. I am the future Hannah that I was once talking to. Now I get to be in conversation with myself. I think a diary is the closest thing we have so far to a time machine.

As a piece of literature, the diary is also interesting because it’s somewhat unable to be categorized into a genre. It is very much a blend of reality and fiction. You may think you’re writing everything down exactly as it is, but in earnest, you’re writing it down exactly as it is to you, and most real people are kind of unreliable narrators, especially when it comes to themselves.

Equipping the “Command + F” function yet again reveals that I complain a lot in this diary. The word “stupid” is used 182 times; “dumb” 31; “annoying” 46; “boring” 48; and “hate” a whopping 246. Additionally, I have used the word “ugly” 42 times. Searching for it yields many upsetting results. Here is a particularly biting and cruel example of its usage.

I am so jealous of this one girl who has everything I want . . . I want to be like her but I’m not. I’m stuck with my life. I’m ugly and single and I do not have perfect grades and all my clothes are weird and I’m not popular and I’m not friends with anyone who is either. Why do I have to be like this? Why me? I’m the worst . . . I hate myself.

- Spring 2019, date unspecified

For reference, here is what I looked like approximately when I wrote that.

age 15

At the time, nobody (except my poor dear parents, who were gracious enough to listen to me cry about my insecurities all the time) really knew that this was how I felt about myself and my life. When I look at this picture, all I see is a normal-looking teenage girl, sitting in her childhood bedroom, probably listening to Ariana Grande. But when I scroll hundreds of pages back and look at the entries from this era of my life, a LOT of them are much like the one above. A staggering amount. And some are much worse. Everything I said about myself was completely untrue. And yet, I had a deep conviction that it was. It was my reality at the time. How do you classify that — fiction or nonfiction?

I realize that most of the examples I’ve shown you today are negative. There are a lot to choose from, because my diary is the place in which I feel safest unloading everything that has ever bothered me, big or small. Some of these things make me very sad for my past self, and I think that makes them very valuable to look back on. It makes me very grateful for how things are now. It makes me appreciate how big life is, while still understanding why I once thought it was so small.

I have so much love for my diary — this digital tome of useless, mundane information about myself taking up storage on my computer. It is the longest and perhaps the most meaningful thing I’ve written yet. It’s a perpetual work in progress, just like I am. I can’t wait to write it in again tomorrow.

And now we end, similarly to how we began.

My coffee is good and it is a beautiful morning. There is much to be happy about. And so I will be. There is a lot that I lack but there is a thousand times more that I have. So I will have it happily. 

- May 15th, 2023

XOXO, Hannah