The Delicious Subversive Joy of a Page No One Else Will Ever Read

A few months ago I found one of my old diaries, tucked away among my books that followed me from one house to another without ever quite being opened, and I sat down and read it properly for the first time in more than forty years. It was an extraordinary thing to experience. I could picture the exact day and the exact place I had written each entry, sitting on my bed as a teenage girl with the whole of her life still ahead of her, and I could feel, quite vividly, how different I am now, how much distance sits between that girl and the woman reading her words back to her, and yet at the same time I could still see her clearly, still recognise her, still feel something of her dreams sitting right there on the page as though no time had passed at all.

I just want to pause for a minute and explain what that diary actually was to me, because I think it touches on something I only half understood until recently. Writing in it felt like having a secret friend, one I could tell absolutely anything, share anything, or simply have a place to write down whatever feelings or events I wanted to remember, without once having to consider how any of it would matter for anyone else. Some entries were entirely mundane, doing chores around the house, but there was no one to impress, please, or disappoint. It was mine entirely, and that, I have come to realise, was not a small thing at all.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that keeping a private page like that has become, in this hyperconnected time we now live in, something close to a delicious subversive act. Almost everything today defaults to being shared, and there is a soft but undeniable pressure in that, a sense that if you are not putting your life out there the way everyone else seems to be, there must be something wrong with you, or something you are failing to properly enjoy. I do not say this to be precious about it, since I genuinely do like sharing things, on Facebook, on my Pinterest boards, and I have no wish to disappear from any of it. But there are moments and experiences that belong only to me, and I have come to believe that having a place for those, entirely free of judgement, entirely free of feedback, entirely free of an audience, is a small and genuine luxury rather than something old fashioned or unnecessary.

A few weeks ago I was watching a caravanning video, someone sharing tips and small discoveries from their own travels, generously and in good spirit, the way people do when they think they might help someone else enjoy their own trip a little more. Underneath it, though, sat a handful of unkind comments, the sort that cost the commenter nothing and the creator rather a lot. It made me quite sad, and it crystallised something I had been circling for a while: this is the ugly underside of sharing everything, that the moment you hand something over to be seen, you also hand over the right to decide how it gets received, and not everyone receiving it will be kind. A private page can never do that to you, nothing you write in it can ever be misread by a stranger looking for something to criticise, because no stranger will ever see it at all. And if you feel like sharing your private thoughts with someone, it will be someone you have entrusted with your most secret moments.

This is precisely the feeling I wanted to hold onto when I built the Making Diary, and the caravan log alongside it. Neither of them is really about organising anything, whatever tidy usefulness they happen to offer along the way. They exist so that the pleasure of writing something down is purely for yourself, capturing what actually happened rather than what would look good, noting a failure and learned lessons honestly alongside a success because both are equally worth remembering. Moments that do not have to be lost simply because the rest of the world has moved on to performing everything instead of just living it. Every time I log a project now, I notice a small, familiar version of that same old feeling of my diary days returning, the sense of doing something to remember it, rather than doing something to be seen doing it.

I think this matters most for anyone who has started to feel a little crowded by all of it, by the quiet, constant sense that a life not documented is somehow a life not properly lived. If that describes you even slightly, I will say this: you are allowed to keep something back. You are allowed a page, a diary, an app, a drawer, whatever form suits you, that holds only what you want to remember, with no one else's eyes ever expected to fall on it. It is not a retreat from life. If anything, it is closer to the opposite, a way of staying properly present in your own experience rather than half living it and half performing it at the same time.

As I hold once again in my hands that old diary, I still think about that girl in her room, listening to music and sitting on her bed, writing down whatever she pleased with no idea that a woman more than forty years older than her would one day read it back and feel, quite unexpectedly, less far away from her than she might have guessed.

Grazia