What's inside those little locked books?
Our journey into girls' diaries began as a gradual immersion in our own adolescent writing that we shared with one another, in the hope of glimpsing something about adolescent spirituality and its import in the lives of girls.
What we found in our own, as well as published diaries by girls, is an enormous range of feeling and life experience recorded in adolescent diaries. Day-to-day accounts of events, family and peer relationships, romances, physical appearance, crushes, excitement and disappointments are laid down in layers with the "big" questions about life, death, meaning, pain, loneliness, loss, God, the afterlife, eternity and identity. We saw glimpses of the spirituality we were seeking to discover - and so much more.
“Alone, afraid I wonder if I am right or am I crazy… Why was I born into this world with a realization of something more.”
Beatrix,
Age 16
“I feel a strange kind of sadness, an emptiness somewhere so deep inside me that it’s impossible for me to find it. I know that you’re not supposed to let these things bother you, you’re just supposed to lie to yourself and say that everything’s alright, but how can I when I know it’s not? How do I wish that I know what I want or even more what do I want. It’s a strange, strange world that I live in.”
Dorothy, Age 13