She had no idea what was coming. Reading her own naive certainty from this side of it was considerably more painful than I expected.
Found my old university diary in a box I have been meaning to properly sort through for close to a decade now, and spent an entire evening this week reading through it properly for the first time since I actually wrote it, twenty years ago, a genuinely disorienting experience that left me wanting, in roughly equal measure, to hug that specific younger version of myself protectively and to shake her firmly by the shoulders until her teeth rattled.
The hugging instinct came from the sheer, exposed vulnerability of watching a nineteen-year-old work through, on the page, in real time, exactly the kind of romantic and professional uncertainty every nineteen-year-old works through, with an earnestness that read, from this considerable distance, as genuinely touching rather than embarrassing, a young woman trying so hard to figure out who she actually was, with a specific brand of naive, unguarded hope I do not think I have carried quite this openly in the two decades since.
The shaking instinct came from watching that same young woman make, with total, unshakeable confidence, several specific predictions about her own future that I now know, from this side of twenty years of actual lived experience, were spectacularly, almost comically wrong, entire relationships she was certain would last forever that ended within the year, career plans laid out with genuine precision that bear almost no resemblance to the actual, considerably messier path my professional life eventually took, a specific brand of confident certainty that I found myself wanting to gently, urgently warn her against, despite knowing, obviously, that no warning from her future self could ever actually reach her.
What struck me most, reading through the whole thing properly, was not really any single specific prediction or entry, but the overall tone, a young woman who genuinely believed, with real conviction, that she had life largely figured out, that the uncertainty she occasionally acknowledged in the diary’s pages was simply a temporary, resolvable state rather than, as I now understand considerably more clearly at this stage of my own life, something closer to a permanent, ongoing condition that never actually fully resolves no matter how many additional decades of living you accumulate.
I think there is something genuinely important in that specific realization, one I do not think I could have properly absorbed at nineteen no matter how many older, wiser women might have tried to tell me directly. The uncertainty does not go away. You simply, gradually, get somewhat more comfortable holding it, a lesson that reading my own younger self’s confident, occasionally quite funny certainty has driven home considerably more effectively than any amount of abstract reflection on the subject ever managed on its own.
I called my own mother after finishing the diary, mostly just to tell her about the experience, and she laughed for a genuinely long time before admitting she still has her own diary from roughly the same age, tucked away somewhere she has not looked at properly in decades, a detail that has left me genuinely curious, and slightly nervous, about what I might discover if I ever actually convince her to dig it out and share it with me directly.
I am putting my own old diary back in its box tonight, not to hide from it exactly, but simply because I think I have extracted what I actually needed from tonight’s reading, a genuine, useful reminder of how far I have actually travelled from that specific, earnest, confidently wrong nineteen-year-old, and a considerably deeper appreciation for her particular brand of hopeful naivety than I expected to feel walking into this evening’s reading.
I think what I actually want to hold onto, closing the box properly tonight, is not really any specific lesson about how wrong she was about her own future, since being wrong about the specific details of your own life at nineteen is, I now understand, simply an ordinary, universal condition rather than any kind of personal failing worth dwelling on. It is something closer to genuine tenderness toward her, toward the sheer, unguarded effort she put into trying to figure herself out on paper, night after night, with a seriousness and sincerity I do not think I have fully recaptured in the two decades since, however much more accurate my own current understanding of my life has actually become.
I am tempted, writing this now, to start keeping a diary again properly, something I have not done consistently since roughly the era this old one documents, curious what my own current, considerably more settled fifty-year-old self might have to say to whoever eventually reads it back, twenty years further down the line than tonight. I suspect she will find plenty to gently shake her head at too, whatever confident certainties I am currently carrying that time will, inevitably, prove at least partially wrong.
That thought alone, oddly, is the most comforting one I have landed on all evening, not the specific content of anything my nineteen-year-old self wrote, but the simple, ongoing fact of the practice itself, one version of yourself leaving an honest record for a future version to eventually read back with whatever mixture of tenderness and disbelief the intervening years happen to produce. I think I owe my own future self at least that much, the same generous, complicated gift my nineteen-year-old self accidentally gave me tonight, entirely without knowing, back then, that I would ever actually come looking for it.
More from this author at Caitlin Moran, prat.uk.