Who's Going To Read You After You're Gone?
It's hard to think about telling someone a personal secret of yours, but it'd be infinitely harder to have someone read all of your deepest secrets and thoughts as if they were reading a shopping list of your embarrassing stories. Most of us have read or heard of Anne Frank's diary in which she fawns over a boy. Even though Anne Frank actually intended her diary to be read, it is interesting to think about what she decided was too private to write down.
I would never in a million years even consider the idea of allowing someone to read a diary of mine (If I had one). I don't even enjoy having my thoughts in my own head let alone documented onto parchment that will most likely out live me by many many years.
If I did have a diary, it would be filled with nonsense. Every page would contain events that never happened and people that have never existed. I would be my intention to make the stories within my diary as distant as possible from the actual events that took place in my life. It would be more entertaining for myself to exaggerate what happened to me each day.
It's not easy to determine whether or not someone was lying in their journals/diaries. What we perceive throughout our lives are very different from what actually occurred, and even if the person was close to documenting anything correctly, it would still be as if they played telephone with themselves, making the content slightly inaccurate.
I would most definitely not destroy my diary, but I would also not have to worry about anyone discovering it and spreading it as if it was my real life, it would all be too ridiculous to believe.
I love your title, it caught me off guard because it made me think about the only journals that I’ve ever kept which are a journal for each one of my three children. Oddly, I hadn't thought of them as relating to the content of this class as I've always considered them somewhat apart from personal journals. When I had my oldest daughter I began, as I think most parents do, to be aware of my own mortality in a way that I never had before and in the beginning the journal for her was a way to tell her about myself and about her start in the world. When I had my second and third daughters (twins), their journals were initially for the same purpose. As the three of them have gotten older, these journals have been a way of reacting to their different experiences and emotions and telling them about big moments that shaped their adolescence. However, like you, I am also reluctant to display my personal self for public consumption.
ReplyDeleteThis actually was something I've always wondered about. I always think, what if these documents in the form of the diary aren't actually completely true. I also wonder if the people may make things seem better than they truly were. Diaries to me are a very amazing thing, because nobody knows what truly went on, what a person was like, especially the ones from a long time ago. We just have to read and believe.
ReplyDeleteI never thought about people lying in their own diaries, I figured that they weren't meant to be a space where people are honest with themselves. Its interesting to think that maybe we don't know as much as we think about these people. Maybe a diary was a space to get away from their lives and into a sort of fantasy world. I suppose it is very important to remember as the reader, we really are only seeing what the writer wants us to see. No more and no less.
ReplyDelete