It hurts for someone to read something that isn’t meant to be read. For me, a diary has always been for my eyes, and my eyes alone.
I’ve written in them when I was happy and when I was sad, frustrated at the world and at myself, and when I was happiest and most content, too. When I began accessing the internet, and realised all about journals and things, I began to feel that, here too was a place where I could express myself without people caring or judging me(of course, that was before the age of youtube comments).
When people began to read and discuss my blog with me, too, I felt acutely uncomfortable, because I never thought my writing would matter enough for people to read it, keep it in mind. That itself is not particularly a bad thing, but to think that people who know me are reading it, and judging me by what I think about, what I write about: It does two things; one, it makes me put an automatic curb on what I say. So now, when I write my blog and think something slightly unconventional or controversial, I pull myself back a bit, hesitate, because
- what will people say?
Which is why I feel violated and/or threatened when people read my diary. I’m not saying, of course, that my blog is so private or so personal that readers should not read it. But my diaries, all the ones I kept since I was around 11 or so, yes, that is something I never wanted anyone to read.
And I know that it's hard to understand why it’s so important to me, but believe me when I say that I wrote whatever I did safe in the knowledge that no one need ever read it unless I showed it to them, and now that knowledge is gone, for everything in my collection. The feeling I get when I read back my old things is replaced by this dread in the pit of my stomach, saying, has someone read this or seen that? And it makes me terribly, terribly unhappy.
You don’t know how much.
I may as well burn the books now, for all the comfort that they give me.
Katze.
P.S. Inspired by the only writer around my age who I really look up to. I didn't think I'd have the guts to post this, but I did.(Or do, rather.)
Mid-Endsem gloominess, hurrah.
