painful lessons in self-honesty

"He took down his pants, kneeled, showed us his asshole, and farted."

I keep diaries. Always did.

Because the best way to understand what’s inside my head is to either talk to someone or write when no one is around. 

However, the way I write has changed over the years. What started as ambitious (read: arrogant) plans of a 16-17-18-19-year-old to take over the world (“Here’s what you should do for the next 60 years to achieve SUCCESS!”) gradually calmed into more peaceful scribbles about what’s actually happening with – I am proud to say! – almost no planning whatsoever and much less self-punishing behaviour. 

Which is strange. Because I used to think of diary writing as something incredibly boring. “Woke up. Brushed teeth. Ate an avocado toast. Went to work. Watched telly. Went to bed.”

Who wants to write, let alone read that? 

I only changed my attitude to diary-writing when I stopped trying to write a certain way. (A general lesson for life right here.) Writing became easy when I wrote down things I felt I needed to process, remember, or acknowledge. Call it therapy, if you will. Either way, I never pushed myself to write diaries. 

Whenever I see people go like, “I really need to build my diary-writing habit this year!”

I’m like, “Uh, why? If you don’t want to do it, just don’t do it. We’ll survive.” 

Will you?

As one famous Russian poet said, “If you can tolerate not writing, don’t write.” 

These days, my diary-writing is less the meticulous retelling of events (which, let’s face it, is as eventful as the example I gave with avocado toasts above) and more resembles mental photography: snapshots of my psyche on a given day. 

I write down how I feel and what I think, and I try to be as honest with myself as I can. 

Sometimes, I am more honest in my diaries than I am with my therapist and other times, I am not honest enough and just bullshit myself in broad daylight.

Sometimes, I don’t like what I’ve written down but I still put it there. The deal’s the deal, and the deal is radical honesty. 

I have a theory: the more honest you are with yourself in the page's proverbial “safe space”, the more honest you’ll be with yourself. It’s a habit, a muscle, something to build. So even if I cringe and want to scream and close my eyes and run away at what I think might be the truth, I still put it down there. For posterity. 

And sometimes, I’ll play David Sedaris and record something funny that I noticed.

I was once on a date with a girl. Closer to the end of the night, we were standing on Picadilly Circus; I hugged her tight, felt the softness of her skin against mine, we kissed, I felt her heartbeat and then… 

…three drunk (or stoned or high, I don’t know) imbeciles ran up from across the street, laughing. One of them took down his pants, kneeled, showed us his asshole, and farted. As my mouth said something along the lines of, “Oh fucking fuck…” and my date closed her eyes in disgust, the imbeciles ran away in the same direction they came from. 

Talk about the awkwardness of first dates. Now that goes into my diary! 

Other times, I’ll record thoughts I find interesting or profound. (Some of them end up going into this newsletter.) Maybe a quote from someone I read, saw on TV, or heard on the street. Once, a guy I’ve just met complimented my character. “You have a radio host personality!” he said, and I wrote it down, joyful, because I had always wanted to work on the radio.

It’s all there. 

Before I write, I date my diary entries on the left margin and put the place where I write on the right (these days, it’s usually Home, London, though occasionally I try to spice things up and go to a nearby Gail’s Cafe). Once the notebook (usually a plain black Moleskine) is finished, I scribble down the months on the side – a habit I picked up from a magazine editor I once worked for – e.g., “May – June 2023.” This helps with sorting. Not that I ever read my diaries. 

Not until recently. 

Earlier this year, 5 AM, Spain. As I appreciated the rainbow, the Uber driver closed his eyes and drifted to sleep. The car swerved to the left. I yelled to wake him up. His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. I could see he was annoyed with me.

You see, I forget what I write in my diaries almost immediately after I close the notebook. For me, that’s not the point of having one.

“What’s the point of having one then,” you might ask, “if you don’t remember what you write and you never read them?” 

More importantly, why keep them? Because I keep them all. And I mean, all. The top shelf of my closet – the one too high for me to see – has stacks of Moleskines back from 2012. I used to say, “This is for my kids!” but lately, it dawned on me that my hypothetical kids would probably not give a fuck.

So the answer to your questions, dear reader, is a shrug. I honestly don’t know. 

But something about the mere act of writing on paper gets the mind cogs turning. Writing does the same to the brain as coffee does to the digestive tract: it starts it up. (Which is why it’s a good first-thing-in-the-morning habit.) Soon enough, something comes out. 

Also, I say that I don’t remember what I wrote, but the truth is that it still lingers somewhere. All the quotes, the thoughts (profound or not), all the farting incidents on the streets, all the feelings, emotions, unwanted truths, they are there, somewhere, in the depths of my subconscious. 

As my father likes to say (cue the male voice of a 50s commercial), “The goal of planning is not the plan – it’s the planning itself!” 

It focuses the mind, gives you a direction, something to follow and, ultimately, ignore. Having a plan you don’t follow is better than walking around blind. 

But the true reason why I didn’t read my diaries is that I was ashamed.

I didn’t want to see the “real me”, face the truth, that kind of thing. It was enough for me to write down what I felt. My moods can shift 90 degrees on any two given days, and what am I, my psychoanalist? What’s done is done, moving on, new page! Who cares what happened on April 23rd 2023, and what I thought and felt back then?

Turns out, my ex-wife cares. Because my last year’s diaries got me a divorce. 

I must pause here for a second and address the elephant. 

“How can a diary get you a divorce?” you might be wondering, and you are right to do that. The diaries themselves cannot do anything. They are cartons and inked paper, after all. But a partner who violates your privacy while you’re at the gym and reads the things you’re too ashamed to read yourself can. Perhaps the fact that this person violates your privacy while you’re at the gym and reads the things you’re too ashamed to read yourself is already a problem. 

But moving on…

The things I found as I re-read my old entries for the first time shocked me. 

If you’ve been following my writing for the past several weeks, you’ve seen how I’ve been moaning and bitching about how my life is all upside down. “I started a year with a job and a wife, and I am ending it without either!” I wrote on the last post in this newsletter of 2023. But my diaries from April to September of 2023 paint a clear picture: I wanted this to happen. 

Seriously. 

Almost every second diary entry I have there – apart from my meticulous running and medical logs as I was preparing for my first marathon and taking anti-depressants – is something along the lines of “I don’t like my life here. Sometimes when I can’t fall asleep, I imagine that I get a divorce, quit my job, and move somewhere else”.

That was April 2023.

Reading this had an almost spiritual effect on me. How can this be that the exact thing that I secretly hoped for happened? You hear things like that, e.g., “Visualize your dreams!” but this was never a dream or a want. I was merely trying to face my difficult emotions daily, and then, bam! it all changes exactly the way you (secretly) hoped for. 

But it doesn’t feel like that, of course. It still feels like a loss. The entries intensified as the year went on and told the story clearly: I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t satisfied, I wanted out. But it never felt like that at the time. Back then, I felt confused. I loved my life, I loved my wife, but I was deeply unhappy, and I processed my feelings by writing about them. 

The things I wrote there were the things I would never have confessed to anyone, and they weren’t something I would have wished for, and yet. They were also true. 

Could it be that I was simply too afraid to make a change I secretly hoped for? Could it be that I lied to myself, pretended I wanted things I didn’t, and didn’t pay attention to the signals that were clearly there? 

An entry from August 2023 goes: “Sometimes I want something to happen to my life, to my marriage, to my job, so that I can start over because I am too afraid to do anything about it myself.” 

Fast-forward to January 2023, my subconscious produced the situation I am currently in. They say to be careful what you wish for. They are right. 

But one more question then, please. 

Where else, in my life, perhaps today, am I lying to myself? 

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We’re funny beings, humans that is. 

As products of success and Instagram culture, we think we want to live a certain way, make plans to get it, and force ourselves to do the “right thing”, but then we somehow end up doing the opposite.

I am a big believer that everything happens for a reason, not because of some magical force meddling with our fates, none of that bullshit, but because we, humans, ultimately do exactly what we want and avoid doing things we don’t want.

It’s a built-in tool, like a feeling of fairness or a survival mechanism. 

Your life right now is the best life you could have, given your circumstances, background, and other factors.

You are where you are because of the decisions you’ve made. And those decisions were made always with your best interests at heart. The challenge is accepting that whatever you are, wherever you are, that’s Life. And that’s You.

Having some data points – like a diary – helps you see the true picture of yourself. So does having a therapist because trying to understand yourself is like biting your teeth. Not very effective.

So, in a way, I am grateful to my ex-wife for violating my privacy and pulling the plug because it taught me two things. 

One. The hardest internal game in life is coming to terms with yourself and being honest. You are who you are. You aren’t who you are not. You don’t get to choose what you want. And your life is not that movie that plays in your head. It’s what it is – today, right now, regardless of what you think. 

We think we are a certain way, but we often confuse the image of who we want to be with who we actually are. We all want to be “our true selves”, but we also want to control who we are because we care what others think. The irony is that these things are mutually exclusive. You become “yourself” the moment you stop trying. 

And two. If you keep a diary, keep it hidden away and locked in a safe. 

Preferably with a password. 

– S

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