For my thirteenth birthday, I got my first diary. Not a diary with dates – a blank, A5 hard-backed notebook. I’ve still got it. It marked the start of years of writing a journal – not every day, but copiously – I’d write about my life, thoughts,  feelings.

In my twenties, I burned all my teenage diaries, save for that first one, in a ceremonial bonfire, a group of friends cheering me on. Letting go of the past, a past I’d tried to understand, but didn’t.

At the end of my teens,  I moved in with a boyfriend and I didn’t keep a diary for the next four years. I can still remember the first evening, after we’d split up and he’d moved out, writing in a brand-new, A4, hard-backed notebook. The joy, the promise of that blank page, after all the sadness of the end of something.

I wrote furiously for the next eight years, pages upon pages, tome after tome. Then not as much when I bought a house and lived again with a lover, and hardly at all when, four years later, my first baby was born.  The need to write to try and understand myself seemed less intense. Maybe I was just more tired.

I started then to think about writing for other people, a huge switch. Keeping a diary is easier, because there’s no reader. Secret words. Diaries are from the inside out, spurting words to empty, like a whale coming to the surface.

[image error]Writing for other people is looking from the outside in. One of my biggest fears as a writer, and from experience it’s a common one, is self-exposure – what will other people think? Will I over-share, be ridiculed, be disliked? Often in life I’m a chameleon,  changing my story according to who I’m speaking to. Writing means being the same person no matter what.

Although, in fiction, I can still hide. My character may hate tories/dogs/aubergines – or think vigilantism is ok in certain situations – I don’t have a view. When I first started writing novels, friends would try to recognise real-life events or people, but I’d just be vague when they asked (and I was surprised by how often they were completely off the mark). I guess psychoanalysts might be able to uncover some of you, but they can’t prove anything…

Writing a blog is somewhere between writing a diary and writing fiction. The inside out, from the outside in. A bid to become more congruent, to care less about how I’m perceived and more about what I want to say.