8 | The Writer • October 2019
FROM THE FRONT LINES
BY YI SHUN LAI
E
very once in a while, I make
the colossal mistake of read-
ing my old diaries. I do it in
a circumspect manner: I
squint one eye closed, lift the lid of
whatever Banker’s Box I’ve chosen
with one index finger, turn my head so
that I get just a glimpse of the books
lined up relatively neatly in their box.
I flip through with one hand, still
holding the box lid aloft with one fin-
ger of the other hand, and choose
something with both eyes closed.
Then I let the lid float back into
place, dislodging dust so that I have to
really squinch shut both eyes.
I crack open the diary the exact same
way: one eye shut; paging through deli-
cately; holding my breath as if I’m about
to smell the stinky tofu of my memories.
Ech, you say. Surely, she’s
exaggerating.
I’m not, I promise. It is so onerous to
look back through my diaries. I do it
when I have to remember things. You
know, recapture feelings, like how it
was the night my mom got robbed in
our driveway and no one heard her
yelling for help. Or the day I turned 40
and my well-meaning husband exe-
cuted a surprise birthday party he
didn’t invite my best friends to (they
lived too far for an invitation, he said,
displaying what I filed away as Mid-
western sensibility).
Yeah, I’ve filed those feelings far,
far away, in a dusty Banker’s Box. You
betcha.
And then there’s the goldmine of
facts: We don’t remember things as theyactually happened. Every time you
remember something, you’re just
remembering the last time you remem-
bered it, so your memory is basically
one big pile of fishing stories in which
the fish just gets bigger and bigger every
time you tell that story. Diaries can
reveal how things actually happened.
So if my diaries are such a wealthy
repository of writing prompts and
information, why the hell do I have
such a hard time looking at them?
The reason is obvious: The writing
is garbage, and I don’t just mean the
stuff from my teen years. Why, as
recently as yesterday’s entry, the writ-
ing is rife with adjectives and adverbs,
it reeks of someone struggling to com-
prehend what has just happened,
someone reaching to make sense ofThe doctor is out
Writing is not that kind of therapy.
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