Dear Diary

Many things in my lifetime have changed. This makes me often ask, “Why did that happen?”

Diary, for instance. In my day, we kept our diary under lock and key. We felt bad when people read it.

Today, many people make Facebook their diary—posting everything that in days of yore was kept secret—and feel bad when people don’t read it.

I was a veritable diarist. It must have in those diaries where I developed my insatiable desire for writing. But when I got married, I burned them all—perhaps to start a new chapter in my life (or start on a clean slate).

What I didn’t realize was, I would still be keeping diaries, tiny they may be, till today:   

 Reading them, however, I see nothing but events, things purchased, and milestones—daily listings of grace. That’s probably why I still write them year after year and allow no one but me to read them.

Sometime along my life journey, I went into book writing and those books have become my diaries. In addition to those books, you are reading my blog. I also keep a small notebook where I write my thoughts and ideas, like a journal of sorts, but that is for another post.

The courage to write a book or a blog is not the same as the courage to write in a diary. I’d spill out everything in a diary, but I am prudent in writing a book/blog. Because there is one big difference. A diary has a reader of one—the writer. A book or a blog has readers other than the writer.

That’s why when I read FB posts that bare innermost feelings, avowals of love or hatred for someone, lurid details of one’s warts or horrible day, rants about this and that, I cringe and stop reading.

Call me old-fashioned (or old, period), but I feel that personal posts are meant only for diaries (or private journals). Yet this cliché stares me down, “Times have changed.”