Diary Reader

This is another exciting chapter from Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped Out

Remember, the story of Rumpelstiltskin? There's the bit where the queen cannot bear the thought of giving up her new born child to the manikin that has helped her to her throne. She hires a messenger to search all ends of the country and when he spies on a little man dancing round the fire, repeating his name, the messenger takes this back to the queen, who of course, guesses correctly, keeps her baby and lives happily ever after.

The Diary Reader is a person who has probably spent their entire life inspired by this story believing that if you sneak up on a person and find out something about them (which is unknown to others) you're able to prevent a worse disaster from happening. Seriously?

The Diary Reader is someone who will never understand that diaries are never really a solid expression or judging ground of the person writing it. For most of us, diaries function as a brick wall that can take anything thrown against it, it even functions as the rubbish bin that we want to throw our unwanted thoughts and emotions into.

In my case, I use diaries (or any piece of paper I can get my hands on) to write out descriptive pieces of characters and scenarios of fictional pieces that pop into my head. I want to do this to keep, to reflect on, to eventually build a story or to one day just glance back and (hopefully) say, my writing style has gotten better.

Now, imagine what a joke it would be for someone to sneakily go through my stuff, read these entries and blab about them or confront me on something that well, never was. Given the state of the way things are, no, if I had a 12 year old, I wouldn't allow private access to a computer or to the Internet. There will be questions and there will shared passwords but there's that big word - shared.

It's not about telling a child "I don't trust you" it's about saying the Internet is not so safe and we need to use it together. Just like crossing a road, you wouldn't let any child cross it alone. It'll always be "hold my hand tight" not "go run across the road and see if you make it across".

More importantly, saying it's shared also means I can and I will look at it when I can or when I want. This is a completely different scenario when knowing something has been kept privately to go dig for it or to open it knowing full well the person's not around.

But oh yes, there's that "We're having a bad patch. I don't understand her. I need to know what's going on." Trust me, what you can't recover in a relationship from talking face to face or with a good old fashioned hug and an "I'm sorry", you're not going to gain anything but more confusion, anger and unnecessary assumptions when you sneakily snatch a few glances at someone else's diary.

To read other thoughts, memories and lessons from Excuse Me, My Brains Have Stepped out please click here.