The first time I got my words and photo printed on a newspaper was in 1991. I was 15 and a junior in high school. The newspaper was Dyaryo Filipino, and on the education section was a survey—“Sino ang iyong idolo (Who is your idol)?”
I said, Anne Frank. At that time I had read her diary once. I would read it again a few years hence, and would see a movie on it much, much later. My answer, in Filipino, had something to do with being brave in the face of change, even a drastic, life-changing one.
I remember all this today because of the news earlier this month that researchers have uncovered two hidden pages of the famous diary, which Anne fondly addressed as Kitty.
The Associated Press reported that Anne wrote the secret diary entry on Sept. 28, 1942, less than three months after her family went into hiding in Amsterdam. The pages contained jokes about sex and some of her thoughts on sex, contraception and prostitution.
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A generation later, if I were asked who my idols are, Frank would still be among my answers—but for much, much different reasons.
She was part of the reason I kept writing diaries—journals if I did not want to sound juvenile or schoolgirlish—well into my…okay, confession: I still keep them.
The documentation changed with the times. My first diary was a real one, with lock and key. Over the next decade they became plain steno notebooks, ones I would lug around everywhere and wrote on whenever “the need arose.” I scribbled furiously while keeping my sick mother company at the hospital, while catching up with readings at the university library, while on board a bus even though the motion made writing in longhand difficult. Later, when I started working and was assigned a computer terminal, I kept a Word file, with a password, and at the end of the year printed that year’s Episodes file.
Oh, but I lost some years. I lost the printouts, deleted the files, or just forgot the passwords. Later, blogging came along and for a while the novelty of “publishing” one’s musings became tantalizing—until times changed again and the dangers of revealing everything online manifested themselves.
With cloud technology I learned to keep the years I had managed to salvage. It is on Google Drive, too where I sustain this habit—no, this means of survival. This way I can access the file from my Mac, which I use at home and use everywhere, even in Grab or the P2P. That, or from my desktop at the office.
One is not always prolific, of course. Months could go by without me writing anything, because I am swamped with work and other, ugh, preoccupations. But always, I go back. It’s not something that is nice to do, or I want to do. One needs it, to clear one’s head, to master one’s emotions by capturing them in words, to express a broad range of and sometimes conflicting feelings, and to allow oneself to have faith that one day, present tempests notwithstanding, everything will fall into place.
Writing journals is not for everybody. Different people make sense of the world differently. Some turn to other art forms, do sports, converse with their friends, for example. Others immerse themselves heavily in work, or on social media, or in some other hobby.
This is why I remember how I was inspired by Anne Frank again, today.
Sure, there is something to be said about weathering change, especially if it is the kind that yanks you out of the comfortable environment you have known your whole life and thrusts you into a situation where you don’t know if you would live or die soon (Anne’s family’s Secret Annex was eventually discovered, they were brought into concentration camps, and only her father, Otto, survived the Holocaust).
But the more compelling reason I would likely still love the diary now is the candor with which Anne wrote it. I imagine she would still have sounded this way even if she survived the war. I try to read through my own stuff and realize that I still sound like quite a girl, even though I am now in my 40s and have seen, considerably, the blows and rewards that life has to offer.
Narcissism? Of course. Diaries are one big “Me me me” document. Self-centeredness is their essence. Isn’t it interesting—hilarious, even—to read back and see how you regarded yourself and the world when you were young and unscarred? How people and places and events could occasion nostalgia, or happiness, or sorrow, or a Eureka moment—“I was so stupid before”? Isn’t it instructive to note how much you have matured, how certain people have come and stayed, or have come and gone, and how you have evolved to be the kind of person that you are now? Isn’t it incredible to see how your questions were eventually answered, and how you became knowledgeable about the things you used to be so ignorant about?
More importantly, however, diaries are a great tool for introspection. Isn’t it amazing to see that beyond the trappings, the inevitable growing up, the accomplishments and the failures, it is the same old clueless, vulnerable, silly, bumbling, rambling—but very hopeful—you?
