My first diary had a purple cover with tiny pink hearts, multi-colored interior pages, and was outfitted with a brass lock and a tiny key that I kept inside my kitten music box that, when opened, played “Memories.”
As I matured, so, too, did the look of my diaries…eh-hem…I mean journals. Periwinkle pages gave way hip composition notebooks and eventually leather-bound, gold-edged affairs. However, all of this goes to show you really shouldn’t judge a book by its cover since the one thing that didn’t change over the years was the actual content of these journals. The spirit of what a diary contained remained consistent, even if the players and vocabulary evolved.
The beauty of diaries is that they are places where you can rail and scream and rejoice and effuse beyond reason and repercussion. You can write maudlin, wicked, pathetic, outrageous and inconceivable things that you would (or should) be mortified to share with anyone else in the world and then, when you’re done? You’re done. No one reads it. No one weighs in on your drama. No one shares your angst. You. Just. Close. The. Book.
Today we have blogs. And in particular, diary-format blogs. And all that emotion that was once poured out onto tree-pulp in the name of catharsis? Today, it lives.
Allow me to demonstrate the potentially destructive nature of these open forum diaries using what I consider to be an apt embodiment of the issue: “Little Shop of Horrors‘”Audry II:
Writer. Baker. Music Maker. 