Bearing witness to myself

so I've been reading my old diaries...

This week, I started packing for a trip on which I would need my hiking shoes. Last year, after treks done in sandals and toe-squishing shoes belonging to someone who was not me, I finally ordered my own. The trip I ordered them for ended up not happening in the summer, but I had the chance to use them some months later, for an art residency in November. I really liked those shoes.

So in the process of packing this time, it turned out that my hiking shoes were nowhere to be found. I checked everywhere that could possibly be checked, above cupboards, underneath beds, suitcases, shoe boxes, the tool cabinet - nowhere. I checked the storeroom. Not there. I checked the store twice just to be sure. I scratched my head at the mystery of it all, because I felt quite sure I hadn’t worn them anywhere here in the city. I became convinced, perhaps as a way to forego responsibility, that there is a black hole in my house, where all my favourite lost things go - my soft new blue t-shirt, my yellow shorts, my mum’s car keys, and now my shoes.

I did find something else in the storeroom though - a box of all my old diaries. These I lugged upstairs and into my room, where I tore through the tape and sat on the hard floor leaning against my dresser, and transported myself back in time for the next little while. These diaries go back about 15 years.

Here’s a premonition from 2014:

And then this lazy attempt at profundity in a low moment:

It’s been so fascinating to see how I’ve laid myself bare to my diaries since I was so young. It’s like writing was the only thing I could do, the most instinctive thing, the best way I could think to process and make sense of life and friendship and my watery heart. There were times I treated my diary like another person, I even addressed it as ‘missy’ once, and then realized that it’s just me I’m talking to, whether at that point in time or ten years later.

There have been different themes over the years too. I didn’t realize I had body image issues at all until I went back and read all the unpleasant things I thought about myself and the way I looked. I’m not even sure how much I even believed those things, and it’s interesting (and a relief) to see how naturally the focus shifted.

Then there was my very first and worst heartbreak. The one that laid the shaky ground for all my future attempts at love or anything like it. It’s been such an embarrassingly long process healing those hurts, now looking back at the ways I felt in real time, the pendulum swinging of my emotions on a day to day basis as I was in the thick of it, the ways I coped and the music I listened to, the ways I toughened myself up, or so I thought:

Reading all of this, despite all the cringey things I said, sometimes even not so nice things, I just wanted to give my teenage self a hug. To acknowledge the ways I’m not her anymore, but also the ways I very much still am.

But also what’s stuck out to me is why I did this. Yes, writing was a way to process. But there was also so much narration - the retelling of my days as if I was telling a friend. These re-tellings have felt like evidence of a life that has indeed happened, outside of just my unreliable memory. Of people I met and conversations I had and rooms I sat in and exactly what they looked like. My mum called it bearing witness to myself.

Which is, I suppose, exactly what I’ve been doing. These attempts to externalize my inner world - these bits of evidence, these traces of past that somehow also contain the present, what was then the future. It feels quite precious.

(This isn’t even all of them)

As I got older, certain things did change. My handwriting got better, and then worse. I stopped writing on lines, which could be the reason why. Perhaps I did not want to be legible. My diaries became prettier, starting from the whatever-I-could-find spiral notebooks, to eventually intentionally making my own. I made attempts at being organized, designating pages for things like insights and books I was reading and significant things I was learning. I may have begun to lose patience for the whole narration thing, but judging by how useful it’s been in hindsight, I may just bring it back.

I spent a couple days in and out of my journals, taking pictures of bits that felt particularly silly, or pertinent, or featured a friend and telling them about it. I wonder when I’ll be ready to part with these, if at all. To let go of my teenage self and everything I learned and felt in the decade following, maybe to make space for whatever is next.

I did not find my hiking shoes. But I sat on my balcony today, contemplative and hungry before iftaar, and I unlocked a memory from my birthday on an island a few months ago, which (lightbulb moment) I realized was the last time I wore them. And for some reason, it never occurred to me that I left them on that boat nearly three months ago until now, when I was actively looking for them. Another testament to this unreliable memory. But there’s a photo to prove it, me on a kayak, in my mucky sandals, with my hiking shoes neatly placed right in front of me. More evidence. There goes the black hole theory.

Sometimes I do delete things - photos, call logs, messages, notes. I don’t necessarily want the evidence. But then there are times I’m thankful for it. I wonder what my life would be like if I didn’t somehow document it. Sometimes I see my paintings in front of me, this collection of work, and I genuinely wonder where it came from, knowing full well that I made it, it came from me. It’s almost like it came out and through, and now it stands on its own, as proof of a time and an experience beyond what it is right now, how I’m experiencing it in myself right now.

And it’s not actually like I do this for the sake of evidence, or for anyone to see, not even myself. But it’s there and it’s a testament to something that existed, something I can witness. I can observe it from the outside. I can watch as it changes. And somehow, magically, there’s me, still here, unchanged, unmoving, in the midst of all of it.