What I've Been Writing About Myself For Twenty Years

How unlocking an old diary is helping me break an old habit

The pinnacle of 2000s girl glory. My most prized possession – and the beginning of one of my worst habits.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about being done beating myself up, how I’m tired of being my own worst critic – my own worst enemy. I wrote about how I’m always the first to blame myself for every and any little thing and have been this way for as long as I can remember. I didn’t realize just how accurate I was in making that statement until this past weekend.

I was at my parents’ house, a place that often brings me right back to being a kid. The banister on the landing of the front staircase, the one with the round knob on top perfect for grabbing as you slingshot yourself over the last few steps, is still right there as you walk in. The same art hangs on the walls, including my eccentric artist uncle’s fever dream forest landscape that adorns the fireplace. My brother’s and my growth charts are still penciled in on the garage wall and the back door still has the scratches from fourteen years of our family dog asking to be let out.

Sure, a few things have changed since I’ve lived there. There’s a new couch and fresh paint in the family room and a big, fancy toaster oven in the kitchen, for example. My childhood bedroom has also been converted into a guest room, my pink and green stripes painted over and my twin bed replaced with a queen. Everything I left is now packed up in plastic bins waiting to be taken somewhere new. It’s all stuff I chose to leave behind when I left for college, things like picture books from when I was little and yearbooks from high school – things I didn’t need but still cherish.

I peeked into one of the bins, just to remind myself of its contents – these things I choose to leave in limbo – and I found my old diary and a little Mod-Podged box of notes. I recognized the diary immediately. In fact, I was surprised I hadn’t had it with me all of these years, given it was my most prized possession at one point in my life. It’s a sparkly Lisa Frank notebook, complete with a lock and key and an image of a Lizzie McGuire-lookalike riding a horse with blue highlights. In other words, it’s every 2000s middle-school girl’s dream. It even says “Secrets” on the front, something I luckily didn’t take seriously enough to separate lock from key (I had evidently learned my lesson after losing the originals and had replaced them with these ones from a vending machine at the Skate Deck).

I took both the diary and the box home with me and automatically bounded to my bedroom, the most apropos place to dive in. Unlocking the diary was like opening a time capsule. Suddenly, I wasn’t Adult Me, I was Middle School Me sitting in a big-girl bed in a big-girl house that Adult Me bought and shares with a real live boy.

The diary starts with an entry from 2002, when I was in the fourth grade. I had received it as a birthday present from my then and now-best friend,

Marissa Crockett

, who has clearly always been an excellent gift giver. It chronicles my days at school and of course my crushes, complete with hilariously cringey doodles sketched in sparkly gel pen. The entries are sporadic, often several months in between, spanning fourth and fifth grades in a matter of pages. But when it hits 2004, the entries get more detailed. Where the previous pages were lighthearted and literal, the rest of the notebook is full of emotion.

My mindset shifts at the turn of each page. I begin comparing myself to others and chastising myself for things I did and said. Obviously, this was the beginning of puberty, but it’s evident to me that it’s more than that. It’s when my sense of self – however warped – started to solidify. As the entries become more frequent, it’s clear how heavily I was leaning on this little book, how desperately I needed to let things out.

I know where I was for most of these entries. I know I was in that twin bed in my childhood bedroom, alone.

I was so, so alone.

I see it now. I see how I got to this point, how this self-deprecation has manifested. I see how it started, how it’s fueled by anxiety.

I see Middle School Me, I see Little Lauren.

It makes me think of a technique I’ve been meaning to try from therapy that I’ve ironically read about recently from two different Substack writers (

Olivia Muenter

and

Morganne Hatfield

). It’s a technique designed to help you find self-compassion by imagining your inner voice is talking to your younger self. It becomes much harder to be mean to yourself when you picture her as an innocent child.

As I sat in my now big-girl bed, digging through this diary, I realized a horrifying reality:

I’ve been beating myself up for over half of my life.

Suddenly, my previous post feels more significant. It means that after twenty years, I’ve finally decided to be kinder to myself.

Twenty. Years.

I’ve been letting Little Lauren down for twenty years.

That is far too long. I would say I have no one to blame but myself, but I don’t want to do that anymore, I don’t want to play the blame game with myself.

It’d be so easy to stay in the cycle. No matter how much it hurts, it seems, as I’ve written about previously, that I gravitate toward the hell I know over the heaven I don’t. There’s a comfort in it – after all, no one can disappoint you if you’re already beating them to it – but what kind of life is that? Is that even living at all?

It appears I’m at an inflection point: I can stay in the rut, going in circles, or I can change course. Like certain parts of parents’ house, some things stay the same as the years go by, and like others, they shift as they need to. This is something that needs to change.

Little Lauren wrote in her sparkly cowgirl diary that she wanted to be a country singer or an actress, and while neither of those things appeals to me much anymore,

I have a newfound mission:

Get her wherever she wants to go.

---

Sometimes I feel these Substack posts are glorified journal entries. Maybe someday I’ll look back on them like my diary doodles and laugh (or cringe) – maybe others will too, and maybe they already do – but I’m choosing not to think about that. Instead, I’m hoping that by remaining vulnerable, I will not only find connection to myself, but to others who feel the same way. If you are reading this and you’re one of those people, thank you. And if you feel compelled to share your own story, I’d love to hear from you.