Dear Diary,

I was back at Mum’s today – it’s always nice to come back to the house I grew up in. I need to savour that feeling. I’m here to box up the last of my things – I’ve graduated and I have a job and I’m moving into a proper house, I’m not renting anymore – I have a mortgage and everything.

Mum’s taking that as a chance to move into a smaller house – she’s found a bungalow on the top of the hill and she can see straight out to the English Channel sea. So I’m glancing through my things – old heartbreak, old love and old happiness, all stored away in boxes in the attack and all around the house.

I used to keep a diary so religiously – I found an box full of notebooks, full of life and colours and stickers, getting more dull as I got older, but the handwriting neater and the action more therapeutic.

It all stopped when I met her. When she told me it was silly and childish and I didn’t need to write things down because we were going to make memories together. For two years she told me this, then she got drunk and a house party and slept with someone on the football team.

But her words stuck with me. I didn’t pick up my diary again. I snapped whenever mum called them diaries and tried to tell her that I wasn’t writing in my journals anymore. It was sad, looking back, but I was also the most stubborn, stereotypical teenager.

And since then it’s been burned into my mind – ‘journalling is silly’, I’ve joined in with the guys at the pub taking the piss out of people who write down their thoughts and feelings and share any kind of emotion at all. But I don’t believe it. I haven’t told them about my therapy sessions.

I’ve sat here for hours reading through everything I wrote, remembering happy times and feelings and memories.

Things change.

People change.

I’ve changed but that doesn’t mean I can’t change back or learn from my past self.

As soon as I’d loaded the last box into my car and drove away from mum’s, I stopped off at a service station on the way to the house and picked up a new notebook – it wasn’t colourful and it wasn’t going to have stickers in but it was sturdy and it had good paper.

When I got home I wrote the date in the top right hand corner and wrote the words I hadn’t in so long.

I’m going to tell my therapist next week. I think he’ll like the idea and he’ll like that I’m doing it myself. He always says that taking control of how I manage my feelings is the important bit.

Thank you.

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Hello!

This piece completely changed direction as I was writing it – I was going to write it from a female perspective but then I thought it would be an interesting from a male perspective and then I remembered that this month is mental health awareness note and Piers Morgan is a twat.

Fuck Piers Morgan.

Mental health is not gender segregation – I hate to be ‘promoting’ and including his tweet because I feel like giving Piers Morgan a voice is the worst thing anybody can do but it’s people like that who make men feel like their mental health isn’t important enough.

I’ve never really done a statement piece of writing before, if you have any comments please leave them down below!

Thank you for reading,

Sophie xx

 

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