Dear Diary Never Lies
In May 2017, I started traveling through people's diaries to find out if they could connect dots to their past by going back in time through old forgotten pages with me. The journey began in South Korea and has continued through India and Cambodia. I have traveled through idle scribbles, absent-minded doodles, forgotten letters, and purposeful manifestos in over 40 diaries in South Korea, Cambodia, and India.
Today, many of us live extremely isolating lives; the global lockdown isolated us from each other even more. To whom do we turn during this time of uncertainty. Our diaries during these testing times let us pen down our fears, hopes, and desires. It should not be mistaken for an exercise that will restore order or bring about great change. It can do this, but that is not the immediate demand we make from our diaries. With time, I realized that more than 80% of promises and to-do lists in my diary never leave the page. I would be happy if by just writing down what I want, it would become real. But the person waking at the other end of this pandemic doesn’t want things so fast. Diligence means to be careful and persistent; this act in itself slows us down. Going back in time through the diary reveals a side of ourselves to us. We connect dots, re-live memories, and conjure an intuitive world. My sense of time has altered in the last few months; I find myself living in the movie ‘Greyhound Day’ where I do the same things every day, but nothing changes. I am about to fill another form to extradite myself from Cambodia to India.
I need the courage to act on what I have learned, and the diary keeps track of the number of days that have passed since I last promised myself something. I should stop it now, or I will continue to waste paper which is another natural calamity I don’t want to partake in.
The diary also mirrors the number of incomplete projects I am sitting on. Some have naturally died because I don’t believe in them anymore, and some are slowly taking a form of their own. This is the natural progression of an idea, where you remove and add to it with time and branch out like a tree. And time is changing me faster than I expected. Yesterday, while watching a video on ‘how light travels,’ I learned that you can go back in time and change things if light could travel faster than time. But that is not possible, and this fact makes my diary my master.
Our diaries can also open ourselves to our own blind spots if we are truly open to being proven wrong and can take decisive action to overcome these. David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two social psychologists, termed this cognitive bias as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the inability to step back and look at one’s behavior as an unbiased outsider. Over time, our diaries can help us redefine ourselves and become better versions of ourselves, one scribble at a time.
Like Sisyphus, a Greek mythology figure who was condemned to push a boulder up a mountain repeatedly and then see it rolling back down again, I plan to keep this sacred act of learning and writing alive. In this act of writing down, I am counting the number of times I lie or procrastinate things that can’t be left to tomorrow.
Till then, here is an ode to ‘My Dear Diary’ from Theodore Roethke:
The Sloth
In moving—slow, he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his Ear,
He thinks about it for a Year;
And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird),
He will assume that you have Heard—
A most Ex—as—per—at—ing Lug.
But should you call his manner Smug,
He’ll sigh and give his Branch a Hug;
Then off again to Sleep he goes,
Still swaying gently by his Toes,
And you just know he knows he knows.