Writing A Diary During Lock down
By: Gwynnie Naylor
Tags: Lockdown, Diary Writing, Covid 19, Mental Health, Writing Tips

I’ve always been awful at writing a diary. I’ve tried so often its embarrassing, from the age of around seven, every year, I’ve made an attempt at the practice, and it never stuck. I’d write one entry, feel very proud of myself, put the diary in my desk and promptly forget about the whole business until the next year.

Yet, over this whole business (I refuse to use the ‘C’ word) I have discovered the joy of writing in a diary. I am highly aware this is not news to anyone, diaries and the records of people have existed just as long as the human race has. Funnily enough, it was at the beginning of the first lock down that I made my initial attempt, writing quite miserable ‘I suppose now is a good time to start writing a diary’, the date at the top of the page, the 14th of March. I then promptly but the diary in my desk and crawled into bed for three months and fell into a state of permanent misery. It was only once lock down was partially lifted, and I was out of my depression cave and back at my university home, that I actually started the whole business up again.

It was early August, I’d begged my parents to drop me back at Sheffield, having convinced them that I’d find a job and work until University started up again. Much to their surprise, I did find a job, serving ice cream and slushies at a dinosaur theme park, and that was when the diary began. I worked out that the only way I’d manage to keep it up was by putting no pressure on myself, so I made a rule that I only had to write one page of my A5 notebook a day. It would take less than 10 minutes. The earliest days looking back are fairly robotic, the news of the day, the petty drama of work (there’s a lot of petty drama when you work at a theme park), the friends I was making, the joy of being out of my parents house and back in civilization. The months I spent working after lock down were not easy, the days were long, the commute arduous, but I was so happy to just be out of the prison of my parents house and working I felt like the happiest girl alive. My new work friends, and now current best friends, really connected with me and I felt loved and accepted, I had a purpose, a great group of people around me, and I was enjoying summer, it felt like a reward for the hardest months of my life. Having my diary, to be able to look back and see those days, those complex memories written so simply, its like looking back on a past self.

I think my diary became more important during the second lock down, that was when I truly started to write in the diary. During summer I had kept my diary as a record of my life, during the second lock down, it turned into a confidant. There were days that I wanted to scream, to throw things, to make a scene, to beat my hands against the wall until they were bloody, but, I couldn’t. I would pull out my diary, and sit at my desk, and I would scribble it all out. Everything, every feeling, every petty piece of anger at the world, at the government, at the situation we have all found ourselves in, all the ugliest thoughts that I wouldn’t tell my closest friends, they all went into the diary. It also started to include a previously unincluded information, the news and updates on the news. I felt like it was important to include, when I look back on everything, I want to have it in the context of those announcements, of those countless press briefings and long election nights.

What I found most interesting was that it wasn’t the beginning which I wanted to write about, because what would I write? I think the prospect of writing a diary in which every entry is an account of me arguing with my parents, the daily death count and my hatred of the lack of a lock on my door would get pretty tired pretty fast. Because that’s what lock down was, it was boring. It was the same thing day in and day out, waking up late, bleary eyes looking at university assignments that felt pointless, watching the daily death toll. I couldn’t stomach writing it down, it didn’t feel worth it. It feels worth it now.