There is something irresistibly intimate about reading someone else’s diary. Not in the way of trespassing, but in the way of invitation—when a writer decides their private musings should be held up to the light, when their once-secret thoughts are allowed to breathe in the minds of strangers…the literary equivalent of Big Boss for us reader type folks. I have always loved these glimpses into other people’s inner worlds, into other eras, completely different universes than mine. And yet, how similar they tend to be.

And yet, despite my admiration for the practice, I have never succeeded in keeping a diary of my own.

It’s not for lack of trying. Over the years, I have started more journals than I can count. Leather-bound notebooks, those ‘yearly diaries from random companies’ that some office goer in the family would get as a new year gift, digital attempts like Day One, or private MS Word files. I have tried the methodical approach—setting reminders, giving myself prompts. I have tried the freeform approach—letting my thoughts spill without order. Each time, I begin with enthusiasm, only to trail off within weeks, sometimes days.

Why?

Part of me wonders if it’s because I overthink the act of recording. Reading published diaries is effortless; writing my own feels self-conscious. When I sit down with a pen or at a keyboard, an odd paralysis sets in. Who am I writing to? My future self? A hypothetical reader? Should I be brutally honest or narrate with the awareness that someone might one day read this? I’m not famous enough that years from now, readers would be interested in what I was thinking that particular day. The moment I start curating my thoughts, the diary ceases to be a diary and becomes something else—an edited version of myself, a performance.

Then there’s the problem of consistency. Real diarists, the ones whose journals I love, write through everything: the thrilling days, the boring days, the days when nothing happens. I, on the other hand, feel compelled to wait for something worthy of being recorded. I tell myself I’ll write later, when I have a more cohesive thought, when I have something profound to say. But life doesn’t wait for profundity. Life accumulates in the small, forgettable moments, and if you don’t catch them as they come, they slip away.

Perhaps that’s why I admire diarists so much—because they succeed where I fail. They capture time as it is lived, in real-time, without the burden of hindsight. They remind me that there is value in recording the unfinished, the fragmented, the uncertain. That life is not just a collection of significant events but also of mornings spent making tea, of half-remembered dreams, of lists of books to read and thoughts that never quite find a conclusion.

I still want to be the kind of person who keeps a diary. I still want to look back years from now and find a record of who I was, in all my contradictions and unfinished sentences. These days, I’m trying again, knowing full well I might fail. But maybe failure itself is part of the practice. Maybe the act of starting a diary—again and again—is its own kind of diary.