Hello. Sorry about yesterday, I just had a bit of an internal explosion of existential dread and needed to express all that, although I was gratified to note that precisely no-one reached out to me to see if I was all right. Not that I'm particularly surprised or was expecting anyone to reach out and see if I was all right, because I'm under no illusions that anyone other than me is reading this blog, but still, y'know. Sometimes it's nice to know someone is looking out for you, and keeping an eye on the means you've been using to express the things you find difficult to say out loud for nearly 20 years.
But like I say, absolutely not blaming anyone. Really, I honestly mean that, no sarcasm. I posted yesterday's screed not because I particularly needed anyone to tell me things are going to be all right — and not just because I'd know they're lying — but because sometimes it just helps to get negative feelings out of your head and onto a page. It doesn't necessarily help you come to any conclusions about how to deal with them, but sometimes simply expressing them is all you need.
This, honestly, was the reason I kept a diary for much of my teenage years. I've talked a bit about this before, as with most subjects on this blog, but it sprung to mind today as I contemplate precisely why I'm still doing this: why I'm typing words into the virtual void for no-one to read, and why I'm still finding it a worthwhile exercise to do so.
I forget exactly what age I was when I started keeping a diary. I'd estimate maybe around 13 or 14 or so. I had recently read The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, which I believe my mother had recommended to me as "worth reading" considering the age I was. I absolutely adored that book and its follow-up The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, and am long overdue a re-read of it all. I recognised that Adrian was a bit of a twat — and this only gets worse in the later installments as he moves into his adult life — but I also recognised parts of myself in him.
So I decided to do as he did, and start a diary. While I forget how old I was when I eventually started, I do remember the circumstances. We had been on a visit to, of all places, the National Stone Centre in Derbyshire, and had gone along with, if I remember rightly, my parents' friends Margaret and Mick. This detail isn't particularly important, but it adds a nugget of context, which was how I was young enough to still go along on visits like that to My Parents' Friends and not just be left at home.
Anyway, the reason I specifically remember that we went to visit the National Stone Centre is because while we were there, I ended up purchasing (or having purchased for me) a lovely hardback journal. It had nice quality paper, it had really nice material on the cover and binding, it was just a lovely book. My parents had encouraged me to use it as a scrapbook of sorts — a book for keepsakes from trips such as the one we'd just been on, as dull as it might have been. And so I did, for a while.
Then, one day, after I had not used it for the above purpose for quite some time (primarily due to having not really done anything worth scrapbooking) I thought that I might start using it to write down… things. I didn't have anything particularly specific in mind when I first started writing in it, I just felt like the experience of writing diary entries had seemed valuable to Adrian Mole in the books I loved so much, and thus I decided to give it a go for myself.
It didn't take long before I started using that diary to express things I found difficult to talk about "out loud", as it were, primarily relating to matters of emotions and feelings towards other people. As noted in my tales of The Rough Book, as a hormonal teenager I fell in love with a lot of girls over the course of my time at secondary school. And I found it difficult enough to admit my feelings about all this to my closest friends at the time, let alone my family. So I told the diary.
I told the diary a lot of things. One of my favourite things to do in the diary was to have "fantasy conversations", where I'd imagine how, in an ideal world, my confessing of my feelings to whatever the object of my affections was that week might go. I'd write these non-existent interactions (because they never actually happened) as a script, because I'd been enjoying looking at plays during English lessons at school, and, later in my school career, had parts in our productions of The Wizard of Oz and Twelfth Night.
I realise this might sound a bit creepy, and it probably is. But what you have to understand is, as an autistic teenager who didn't know he was autistic, social interactions, particularly with someone for whom you didn't really know where you stood and lacked the self-confidence to ever believe they might be interested in you, were very difficult. I wrote those "conversations" down because I knew I'd never be able to pull them off in reality. They were a comforting fiction, in a way; they allowed me to indulge my imagination and think about something which I believed to be impossible in reality.
There was one exception, as I recall. On one of the numerous occasions I had plucked up the courage to declare to my friends that I fancied a girl named Nikki, my friends practically forced me to tell her how I felt. They got me and her out onto the school field, essentially pushed us together and left me to get onto it. And, to my credit, I successfully managed to confess my feelings to Nikki, who, bless her heart, at least let me down exceedingly gently and pleasantly.
That evening, I decided to "analyse" the situation. I wrote a script based on what had actually happened. I drew diagrams, with a little picture of a lightbulb representing how much I was blushing through the whole experience. I attempted to determine if there was anything I might have been able to do differently and, of course, came up short; no means no, as it were, and that is something I have always respected.
As that lovely little journal started to fill up with my innermost feelings, I started to become uneasy. I'd taken to placing it in a position on the desk in my bedroom where it was inconspicuous and unlikely to be picked up and read by someone coming in, but something in the back of my mind was still gnawing away at me, worrying that my Mum or Dad would pick it up, read it all and… well, take the piss, frankly, because there was a lot in there that one could probably take the piss about.
So one day I snapped. I took the journal and I threw it away. I took care not to throw it away in the kitchen bin, where it might have been noticed, but rather to throw it away in the outside bin, concealed in a bag beneath a large black bag of rubbish: somewhere no-one would even think to consider taking it out and rifling through it.
I regret that, now. I think it would be interesting to go back and look over those journal entries my teenage self made, as embarrassing and weird as some of them might have been. I don't know that it would have been helpful to do so, but thinking back, my school days (or, specifically, my time at secondary school and sixth form) are a time in my life I look back on with great fondness, where I was, retrospectively, very happy and satisfied with my lot in life, even if I had very little in the way of luck with women.
Thinking back on that diary is one of the reasons I've kept this blog around for so long. There's things I look back on that I'm not so proud of having written, and there's things I'm glad I wrote about. The one constant is that this blog is completely, honestly, unabashedly me, and it always will be.
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