Do you keep a diary?

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Zlata Filipovic also had a diary named Mimmy She expressed in her diary her fear that she, being compared to Anne, could also "end up like her". But luckily for her, nothing like that happened. I generally like reading famous people's diaries - I especially enjoyed the ones by Pepys and L. M. Montgomery. I didn't like the one of Maria Dąbrowska though - she was a very famous writer from Poland. When I read her diary, I didn't understand - as she didn't express it directly - that she was a bisexual lady in a romantic relationship with another woman with whom she raised that woman's daughter.

This gets me during each reading:

“I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death!”

— Anne Frank

I think she has certainly achieved that.

Absolutely! That’s part of what makes it so…powerful and moving, I think.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 16 Mar 2024, 1:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have a morbid fascination with world war two, so Anne Frank is very interesting to me.

As harrowing as her story may be.

Yeah that's powerful stuff

I've never read it

It’s a good book. What makes it so upsetting isn’t the content but knowing what came after her last entry… It’s very frustrating not being able to help people in their autobiographies/diaries. I felt like that after reading the autobiography of Elizabeth Smart recently.

If only I had a working time machine.

Have you read the diaries of the teenage Polish Jewish diarists living during the war, like the ones of Dawid Rubinowicz, Rywka Lipszyc and Renia Spiegel, as well? I didn't but I did read about those a lot. Once I saw Dawid's diary in a secondhand bookstore but I didn't buy it then.

Last edited by Irulan on 16 Mar 2024, 2:01 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I haven’t. It’s tricky. I have to be really cautious about what I read or it triggers my PTSD - even with works of fiction. Damn brain. I’ve tried desensitizing myself but nothing works.

I have to be in the right frame of mind for it.

I think you've been cursed with empathy TP

I do . Every time I do general yearly house cleaning. Actually, sometimes I skip few years and than take time to read some pages again. It kind of like watching old photos..

Wow..how long does it go back

It can go as long as going back to when I was like eight years old. We used to have something that preceded diaries, kind of yearly memory books. You would write different questions on each page and than give it to your classmates to answer them. Some pages were reserved for short childish poems, stickers of Snoopy or Sarah Kay, etc. Later they developed into something that looks like early Facebook, I'll try to find it and post it here. Diaries, to me , came later, when I was 13.

Yeah I'd like to see an example of that.

It's always fascinated me how people keep diaries because I just wouldn't know how to do one. Fair play to you for keeping it going for so long.

No, no, I quit diaries when I was 17. They did their job . Now I wouldn't be able to write everything in details like I did, even if I wanted. I lost my ability to concentrate that much. Actually, notes would work much better for me now, like you do .

OK