Dear Diary ...

The thought of your teenage diaries might make you cringe, but there’s a return to journal-keeping and it’s proving a reliable antidote to social-media angst. ELLE speaks to four women about the mind-clearing, career-defining power of putting pen to paper

those who keep a diary, and those who don’t. While the latter may write journals off as cringeworthy and self-indulgent, the former rely on them to organise their thoughts and keep a check on their mental health. At one point, actress Emma Watson kept not one, but ten personal diaries to help ’figure herself out’. ’I keep a dream diary, a yoga diary, I keep diaries on people I’ve met and things they’ve said to me, advice they’ve given me. I keep an acting journal. I keep collage books… It allows me to get things out of my head and work them out in a way that feels safe,’ she told Rookie’s Tavi Gevinson (who tells us about her own obsession with journal-keeping overleaf). While ten diaries may feel like a lot of hard work, more and more people are choosing to track their thoughts offline, and are recognising the benefits of doing so. Oprah Winfrey started a gratitude diary (writing down five things she was grateful for every day) 16 years ago and said, ‘It is the single most important thing I believe I have ever done.’ For Tina Brown, who published The Vanity Fair Diaries last year, writing a diary is her ‘soul having a conversation with itself’.

Taking time to write, essentially to yourself, is also the cornerstone of many approaches to self-care. In her bestseller The Artist’s Way, first published in 1992 and currently resurfacing in New York and LA creative circles, author Julia Cameron encourages readers to do three pages of free-flowing writing every morning to unclog mental fog.

Experts also say the healing goes beyond the physical act itself. ‘Writing about our thoughts and feelings triggers an area of the brain called the right prefrontal cortex, and once this area is activated, a more primitive part of the brain related to strong emotions and images becomes relaxed,’ explains psychotherapist Maud Purcell. But it’s also the honesty of diary-writing that makes it so cathartic, and often hilarious. ‘Our online selves are totally curated, but people are more honest in a diary, and there are huge benefits in that,’ says Ana Mclaughlin, who runs open-mic night

Cringe, where people read their teenage diaries aloud. ‘We’ve had people read their diaries from the Seventies and the preoccupations and are the same: does he/ she like me? Are my friends plotting against me? Will I fail my exams? Why are my parents so unreasonable?

How is my hair? Though cultural and topical concerns change, the things that really bother us as adolescents – and later in life, too – are often the same.’ ELLE speaks to four women about their relationship with diary-writing, and how it has shaped their lives.

“OUR ONLINE SELVES are TOTALLY CURATED, BUT PEOPLE are MORE HONEST IN A DIARY”