What should in an ideal world define someone as a writer isn’t that they publish books,
or give talks at literary festivals or wear black; it’s that they belong to a distinct group
of people who - whenever they are confused or in distress - gain the greatest possible relief from
jotting things down. ‘Writers’ in the true sense are those who scribble - as opposed to drink,
exercise or chat - their way out of pain. The act of writing, especially in a journal
or diary, is filled with therapeutic benefits. So deeply do certain ideas threaten the status quo,
even if they ultimately offer us benefits, the mind will ruthlessly ‘forget’ them in the name of
a quiet life. But our diaries are a forum in which we can raise and then galvanise ourselves into
answering the large questions which lie behind the stewardship of our lives: What do I really
want? Should I leave? What do I feel for them? We may not quite know what we want to say until
we’ve started to write; writing begets more writing. The first sentence makes the second
one clearer. After a short paragraph that was summoned from apparent air,
we start know where this might be going. We learn what we think in the process of being forced to
utter ideas outside of our swampy minds. The page becomes a guardian of our authentic elusive self.
Here we can make vows and attempt to stick to them: No more humiliation! The end of masochism!
Ordinary life can seem to have no place for stock-taking and moments of grand enquiry.
But the page demands and rewards them: What am I trying to do? Who am I? What is meaningful
for me? We’d never get away with such things at the dinner table, even among people who
claim to love us - but here they make sense. We can look back at what we’ve written and
understand. The page is a supreme arena for processing. We can drain pain of
its rawness. We can get used to disasters and stabilise joys. We can turn panic into lists.
Five ways to survive this. Six things I am going to tell them. Four reasons not to despair. We
won’t need to be so jittery in the world outside after we have told the notebook all this.
The page becomes a laboratory in which to try out what might shock
and surprise. Leave the job. Tell them it’s over. We don’t need to honour everything we
say. We’re giving it a go and seeing how we feel. It’s the first draft of a letter to ourselves.
Looking back at what we have written should be embarrassing, if what we mean by that is
hyperbolic, disjointed, uncertain and wild. If we aren’t appalled by much of what we
have said to ourselves, we aren’t beginning to be truthful - and therefore won’t learn.
If in ordinary life we make a little more sense than we might, if we are
a bit calmer than we were, it’s perhaps because - somewhere in a drawer - there
are pages of tightly compressed handwriting that have helped us to understand our pain,
safely explore our fantasies and guide us to a more bearable future.