Old diary

Last night I dug up the diary I kept in 1991 and 1992. It is a battered 416 page exercise book with apple green and black stripes on the cover and two stickers from a women in tertiary education conference on it. My handwriting looks very strange and flat – literally flat in the sense that the letters are formed close to the lines on the page. Proof that if nothing else, my handwriting has changed over the years.

I don’t know if I can bear to read the whole thing too closely because I was such a miserable git back then. How does it go? Youth is wasted on the young!

In 1991 I went to Sydney and Melbourne for the first time, for aforementioned conference. According to my entries, the conference was tedious, it was very cold and wet, and I was either sick with a cold, or wishing I was home. I actually wrote that “I didn’t pay much attention, i didn’t want to attend, didn’t want to be there.” So why on earth did I go, I wonder? Back then I was a poor struggling student so it would have been hard to scrape the pennies together for airfares and such. I don’t remember now, and my motives are not stated in any of the entries around that time.

1992 was the year I spent in Hangzhou, China, as an exchange student. I was a miserable git that year too. Judging from my diary I was homesick and missing family and friends for much of the year. Or maybe I only wrote in my diary when I was feeling homesick and missing my family and friends – heh! I wrote really pathetic things like “Just wrote a cheerfully positive, descriptive letter to Mum after during which i got inexplicably depressed thinking ‘i mustn’t write as if i’m going well – something terrible is bound to, going to, happen to me!’ And i didn’t even want to write this in this book, just wanted to put it out of my mind. So what is this, some horrid premonition? Or is it just me as usual, not letting myself feel good about anything without putting some sort of a dampener on it?” (Terrible!)

It’s not exactly true that I only wrote when I was feeling miserable though, as I did describe lots of people I met and things I did. Sadly, I don’t really remember a lot of it all that clearly now, and there are plenty of incidents that I have completely forgotten about – even re-reading the diary doesn’t prompt the memories. It is good to reread bits and think about those long ago times…

There are also a few pictures I drew in the diary, mostly little sketches illustrating how I was feeling at the time – lots of glowering, sulking CWs wallowing in her gloom. That’s one thing I miss with writing in the electronic medium – you can’t doodle in the margins. And then there’s the feel and smell of the book – you don’t get that with a blog! Slipped in among the pages I’ve even got some old grain ration coupons (do they still use these in present day China?), some renminbi notes in small denominations, and drafts of letters written on ultra thin Chinese paper. There were no Internet cafes back then and all my communication with family and friends was via handwritten letters – I wonder if anyone has kept any of the letters I wrote back then.

Categories: diary, writing, China