"How many do you have?" my son asked me a couple of weeks ago. "Many," I say. I don't have an exact count of how many diaries I have filled for him in twenty years. Most are packed away in a box in a closet. All are in my own handwriting.
Lots of people keep their diaries/journals online now, and there are certainly benefits of doing so - convenience, ease of storage, ability to save in files with photos, and typed entries are a lot easier for others to print and read - no need to try and decipher someone else's handwriting.
But, there is a peculiar emotional power that handwritten diaries possess that computer diaries can never match. Handwriting is entirely personal and easily recognizable as a stamp of our identity and personality by those we love, by those who love us.
Handwritten diaries transmit a sense a intimacy to the writer and the reader. My hand, my pen, forms each word on the page, writing in a script that no single other peson in the world could exactly duplicate. When my children read my words they will know beyond any doubt that they are mine.
Yesterday, I was cleaning out my mother's desk so that it could be moved, sorting through years and years of bank statements, old Christmas cards, miscellaneous photos never filed. . . I came across some answers on a questionnaire she had filled out and saved. Personal questions she had answered, spilling feelings and thoughts she had committed to paper.
I wasn't her intended audience. I felt like a spy and an intruder, but I couldn't resist the impulse to read something my mother was revealing about herself - and I was surprised by her answers to these questions. I never knew she felt that way. If her answers had been typed, it would have been easy for me to distance from them - to imagine they belonged to someone else. But in her own handwriting, there's no doubt. They belong to her. And I understood some things about my mother, on paper, that she has never been able to tell me.
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