When my parents found my diary
Is it a crime to keep a diary as a child?
To this day, I don’t know what inspired me to keep a diary. All I remember was my Dad handed my sister and me a jotter with dates all year, and each day had a space to fill up with words.
I hadn’t seen anyone keeping a diary ever before. But if you live in a home where it feels like you always get picked on for even the slightest of things like placing the plate in the wrong compartment – you soon develop a coping mechanism for dealing with the situation.
As a child, the last thing I wanted to do was yell at my parents because even in times when I didn’t yell at them but tried to pass my opinion – it never ended without me feeling like a waste of sperm.
My sister and I turned it into a streak to keep ourselves consistently writing in our diary. We didn’t prepare for what was going to happen next.
All hell broke loose the day they discovered my diary, filled with my emotions trying to make sense of things. They read every single page about my experience. It triggered anger, intimidation, and a sense of violation in them.
Another parent would take the data in that diary and use it to enable a better parenting environment. An opportunity to retrace their steps. Instead, I got called names, ungrateful, idiot, useless child, etc. The room was filled with shouts and escalated to punishment.
I never wanted to see anything that reminded me of a diary. Not even a paper. As I write this, what if this negative experience was what eventually affected my interest in my studies? Oh, well.
The once-welcoming pages are now as silent as a graveyard. I dare not write again because what if it gets found out? Fear replaced therapeutic writing not by choice but by the haunting memories of that day.
The diaries may have attempted to be silent, but the spirit of the child seeking a place to find meaning in life persists, seeking healing beyond the ink-stained confines of the past.
Is it a crime to keep a diary as a child? Did you ever keep a diary?
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My diaries were also read. I was grounded for a month, not allowed to see or talk to my best friend at the time again, and watched like a hawk from then on. Apparently the only acceptable things to think and do for a teenage girl were homework, sports, and chores. I finally, thankfully, got back to journal writing later, but I haven’t trusted my parents with information I think they’ll find damming since… and I’m in my mid-forties. I feel like that incident gave me the impression that I was just absolutely rotten from the inside out, and I’m only now beginning to recover from that misconception.
I'm sorry you had this experience. Similarly, I had a stepdad that once found my diary and tore out all the pages, scattering them all over my room to show he'd read them. They were mostly filled with my feelings about how awful my home life was, so it felt very hostile and even more emotionally unsafe from then on. I've not kept a proper diary since then but never made the link to why until reading this post - but it truly is because every time I have tried to since, I've become paranoid that whatever is in the pages could be used against me. Awful.