or give talks at literary festivals or wear  black; it’s that they belong to a distinct group  

of people who - whenever they are confused or in  distress - gain the greatest possible relief from  

jotting things down. ‘Writers’ in the true sense  are those who scribble - as opposed to drink,  

exercise or chat - their way out of pain. The act of writing, especially in a journal  

or diary, is filled with therapeutic benefits. So  deeply do certain ideas threaten the status quo,  

even if they ultimately offer us benefits, the  mind will ruthlessly ‘forget’ them in the name of  

a quiet life. But our diaries are a forum in which  we can raise and then galvanise ourselves into  

answering the large questions which lie behind  the stewardship of our lives: What do I really  

want? Should I leave? What do I feel for them? We may not quite know what we want to say until  

we’ve started to write; writing begets more  writing. The first sentence makes the second  

one clearer. After a short paragraph  that was summoned from apparent air,  

we start know where this might be going. We learn  what we think in the process of being forced to  

utter ideas outside of our swampy minds. The page  becomes a guardian of our authentic elusive self. 

Here we can make vows and attempt to stick to  them: No more humiliation! The end of masochism!  

Ordinary life can seem to have no place for  stock-taking and moments of grand enquiry.  

But the page demands and rewards them: What am  I trying to do? Who am I? What is meaningful  

for me? We’d never get away with such things  at the dinner table, even among people who  

claim to love us - but here they make sense. We can look back at what we’ve written and  

understand. The page is a supreme arena  for processing. We can drain pain of  

its rawness. We can get used to disasters and  stabilise joys. We can turn panic into lists.  

Five ways to survive this. Six things I am going  to tell them. Four reasons not to despair. We  

won’t need to be so jittery in the world outside  after we have told the notebook all this. 

The page becomes a laboratory in  which to try out what might shock  

and surprise. Leave the job. Tell them it’s  over. We don’t need to honour everything we  

say. We’re giving it a go and seeing how we feel.  It’s the first draft of a letter to ourselves. 

Looking back at what we have written should  be embarrassing, if what we mean by that is  

hyperbolic, disjointed, uncertain and wild.  If we aren’t appalled by much of what we  

have said to ourselves, we aren’t beginning  to be truthful - and therefore won’t learn. 

If in ordinary life we make a little  more sense than we might, if we are  

a bit calmer than we were, it’s perhaps  because - somewhere in a drawer - there  

are pages of tightly compressed handwriting  that have helped us to understand our pain,  

safely explore our fantasies and  guide us to a more bearable future.