IN DEFENCE OF DIARY

Diaries have always held a fascination for me, but I have never been able to write one. I mean, I have attempted many times but I always gave up. I started to write one between primary and secondary school. I remember it had a lock, but that didn’t prevent my curious sisters from reading it, so, I stopped. I kept my thoughts inside of me until the white pages called me again. But because I knew that my sisters would most likely read my diary again, I was never a hundred percent sincere or honest about what I wrote.

However, constancy has never been a faithful friend to my writing. Besides, there was another issue: keeping a diary was considered among my peers as something younger kids did, at an age when they wanted to be seen as being mature. I never pretended to be older, but I didn’t want to be uncool! So, I lost interest and gave up again.

Regardless of my inability to keep a diary I continued to read some of them, some of ordinary people who, like Anne Frank, became SOMEONE by having written a testimony of a very important moment of history. I like this consideration, that our life and our, perhaps, insignificant moments could become important traces of history for generations to come. Everyone might become a writer through writing a diary or a journal. Anybody with some form of literacy, in fact, is capable of relating on paper their thoughts or the events that happened to them. Of course this doesn’t make them a writer, because their style, their choice of words might be confusing, non attractive, or lacking in structure. Not everyone is a natural writer, not everyone is Anne Frank. In most cases, their diary will remain a document known only between their own four walls. But that doesn’t mean their diary is insignificant and worthless. A personal diary is an important historical record of one’s life. So, if you do keep a dairy please, don’t through it into flames, out of shame of what you have written, because one day you will enjoy and maybe laugh reading about a different and younger you. You might rediscover events you’ve forgotten; people and friends who used to be your world at a time that has buried in your past. Your diary should be treasured if only to provide revelations about why you become who you are today. So, don’t be another diaries’ arsonist; there are too many out there, and after all, your diary has been your companion for a while.