Dear Diary

Dear Diary,
When I was young, I imagined you were one of the most important things in the world; I remember getting you and being so excited! The prospect of writing down my innermost thoughts on your pages was almost more than my eight-year-old heart could bear. I carefully kept you from my nosy sister, and then I lost your stupid, tiny keys one by one until I couldn’t lock you, but just hid you in a drawer. I almost forgot about you as I moved on to endless hours on the phone to my best friends, telling them all my woes. Here are some actual diary samples:

“we have just got to San Diego when I found out that our camp sight number was… H17 the end.”
“Thoughts… I love a man I saw him at a show”
” today is national bathroom day… a joke… ha ha”.

Oh Diary! When I flip through your endless blank pages — and about 90% are blank — I wonder what made me remember you as so special? There are only two or three entries in each year-long book! I thought I had filled your pages until they were positively brimming with my youthful, poetic angst!  What was I protecting?

Now my own daughter has a few diaries and, though they are also mysteriously blank, (tiny keys be damned, I peeked), she guards them like Fort Knox. Is it the keys that are the secret? Something worth locking up must make me special! So why is it that now, as a grown-up, I will put nearly anything in writing in an e-mail, or blog about my messy, post-divorce life? Is the opposite true? Is a secret only as good as the next Facebook headline?