My diary has truly turned into something beautiful. It is, for the first time, a tangible stream of consciousness that I can forever tap into to both see my growth and relive my experiences.

Of course, I’ve had diaries before, if you could call it that. But as with my earlier blog posts, they were always fairly if not fully detached. When I was growing up I kept something that I would more call a log than a diary. I’d write about the travels I often took with my family, taking stock of specific details like our room number and the names of my favourite restaurants rather than writing about how I felt or what was going on in my head. Still, in its own right, it was beautiful. From an early age, I knew how important it is to journal, or better yet, to observe.

Now, at 25 years old and in a stage where I want to be as light as possible, I find myself with a book full of my own handwritten notes about perhaps the greatest love I’ve ever known.

I’ve been contributing to it, steadily, for about a year and a half and every time I revisit a day, it gives me nothing but positive feelings about not only how I felt in that moment, but also about how much I have grown since then. My own words are helping me to love who I was then and who I am now because of it. And, of course, as a writer, I also sometimes surprise myself. Many times I have gone back to a piece of prose and found myself in awe that I could have produced such poetry; much like what happens on this very space that I’ve etched for myself on the vast interwebs.