My Nana was one of the greatest women I’ve ever known, but I only knew her for 6 years.
Most of what I know about her are stories from other people. The recollections of other family members of a woman who I never got to fully know and who never got to know me as I am today.
I wish I could talk to her now at 21, as a much more interesting and thoughtful person than 5 year old me.
There’s so much I want to ask and know about but that I have no access to.
I think that’s part of the reason I’m so attached to keeping a record of memories.
Memory is something I think about a lot because once we’re gone we effectively become memories. That's what’s left of us when this life is over.
And in that sense I think in the age we live in we’re uniquely blessed that we can have memories in so many different formats. Videos and photos on endless social media accounts that will likely outlive us if they’re never deleted.
I think about the visual record that exists of who I am that I can pass on to my children or grandchildren in the future. Along with a visual record I also try to keep a written record of who I am in the present moment.
I started writing a daily diary when I was 17. I started it because I was in my last year of high school and I wanted to write down what I was feeling to look back at it when those years became a distant memory. But in the 4 years I've kept writing a diary it’s transformed into so much more than that.
It’s a snapshot of who I am, how I change as the years go by, what thoughts consume me and confuse me. It's physical memories of things I don't want to forget. It’s old museum tickets from Amsterdam and Lisbon, it’s my brother’s graduation ceremony brochure, it’s tickets to a musical I got as a gift for my 20th birthday.
Most importantly it’s my thoughts and ideas. It concretely captures myself in this moment, who I am and what I believe in.
We reveal ourselves most in our words. Our thoughts, feelings, ideas, emotions are all expressed to a greater extent when we write them down, even if the only person intended audience is ourselves.
I started a diary without this intent but it’s always been at the back of my mind, remembering what I was like in this moment in time. To capture different days of my life in short paragraphs in a leather bound diary to look back on and remember that day, that moment or that feeling. To remember what I thought was important, to remember the day I started university, the day I started my first job, the amazing days and the terrible ones and the mundane ones in between.
And it also allows future generations I may have to know me in a way I haven’t been afforded. To give my grandchildren a chance to experience knowing me in a way I never got to intimately know my Nana.
I hope my diaries provide this to my grandchildren and give them a piece of who I was. So they can have more than a few photos or fading memories to remember me by when I'm gone.
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