Chapter Thirteen: “I’m Making Myself Quite Miserable:” Mood Tracking and Maintenance in the Diaries
I went to bed last night and wrote in my diary before drifting off, as Lara Gilbert did so many times. My ritual holds still—the process of quieting succeeded, but it turns out my thoughts were just folded up and tucked away for an hour. Now I’m wide awake; the clock says 12 am. The orange street light filters in through half closed Venetian blinds, enough light to make out the shape of the big cube book case, the dresser, a pile of clothes on the floor. Usually when I wake at night, my three year old daughter has crept into our room needing an escort to the washroom, or a drink of water. But tonight, my daughter doesn’t wake me. It’s Lara.
Next to Lara Gilbert’s prolific diary output, I look like a dabbler. This was clear yesterday as I leaned over two filing boxes filled with 3,000 pages of her writing in the brand new room at the McPherson Library Archives. Hardcover notebooks, every one of them filled to the last page, took up the entire top shelf of a heavy, narrow wooden book truck that the librarian pushed out to the table. I’d wanted to pull the other end, to help out.
I took a deep breath. The new archives were soothing in every respect. The air smelled fresh and clean, with a hint of new carpet. The sturdy tables, as yet unmarked by bored students, reflected natural light streaming in from outside. My eyes were soothed by the grey and burgundy decor, wood, steel, glass, and gray concrete steps outside the window. The archives were no dungeon, but still my heart was heavy as I lifted the lid off the first file box, anticipating the content in Lara’s diaries, content that would trace the serious ups and downs of one girl’s intense moods. I pulled out a few files, each one containing a single volume of her writing with small photographs, notes, and tickets that would have fallen out of the book itself if they weren’t now carefully held in smooth, cool folders. Some of her books had colour and pattern. I recognized the same green and pink Chinese diary with each page decorated with a faint design around the margin—the same one is also in Molly’s collection, Beatrix’s, and Emily’s. Most of Lara’s volumes though are between plain black covers. I sat down with the first book and opened it up. Hopefully a few days of reading would answer my question: Was diary writing a good thing for Lara? Or did the practice contribute to her demise?
I’d been putting this off. For some time, I’d known about this donation to our project. I heard Beatrix and Mary talk about Lara’s writing, how impressive it was in both volume and quality. But Lara’s diary chronicles her fight against depression and her work to uncover memories of alleged sexual abuse by her father and grandfather until she completed suicide shortly before her 23rd birthday in 1995. She wrote trying to reveal the sources of her trauma while she destroyed her present self, piece by piece. Not light reading. But the day had come to dive down, so I did.
I’d heard Mary talk about visiting Lara’s home, where Lara’s mother set aside one room as a shrine to her lost daughter, to display photos, quilts, and other artwork dedicated to her. Dr. Scott and the project members talked about Lara’s background: she grew up in the Strathcona and Downtown Eastside neighbourhoods of Vancouver; her separated parents were both writers, her mother also an artist. Mary, Beatrix, and Dr. Scott didn’t talk about the father by name, but there in the first pages of Lara’s diary she refers to her parents by their first names: not “Mom” and “Dad.” In 2004, Lara’s mother self-published a volume of her daughter’s later entries starting from age 15. She gave the complete set of diaries to us in 2006.
Our project was interested in her material from younger ages, so I dutifully plugged in my laptop, and started transcribing a few early entries. I started with her ten year old hand, tall and thin like Lara herself. I began skimming over some early, pencilled entries about school. Some of the content was so familiar to me, just by virtue of having also been ten in the mid-eighties. If Lara were still alive today, she would be 35, my own age. I flipped to the back of her first diary, where I found a song she wrote. A few lines nearly take my breath away.
Lara, Age 10
‘cause I love you, life
and I love you, nature,
so please don’t go away from me.
I closed the book for a minute. I was remembering something in my own diary, from age thirteen:
Molly, Age 13
I love life. I value it more than anything. Please god, Please don’t take it away from me.
I took a deep breath. I didn’t expect to feel as though I were reading my own words as I read Lara’s diary. That was enough of a blow. But to read her happy and in love with life—how could she go from there to wanting to die? I opened the book again. Early entries chronicle Lara getting excited about rides at the Pacific National Exhibition, things her friends did at school, first crushes. I looked up and glanced out the window, watched students hurrying up and down the concrete stairs, or settling down to sit and read. Reading this happy chattering voice talking about her love of life was almost physically painful. But I kept on, wondering when the dark cloud first covered Lara’s thoughts and emotions.
I didn’t have to read far.
Lara, Age 10
It seems as if when you get older, you don’t look forward to holidays as much. I mean, last year, on Hallowe’en, my birthday, Christmas etc. I was so excited. But on Hallowe’en this year I wasn’t half as excited. And last year, when it was less than a week from my birthday I was feeling wonderful, and my mother was talking to people about my presents. But right now, I’m not that happy, I’m actually a bit sad.
She didn’t say why, and indeed I wonder if she was even conscious of what made her sad. Later on in her volumes, Lara complained of her dark mood, and said there was no reason for it. I knew how she felt. I read her words and thought about what she must have looked like on the outside, to her teachers, to her mother. “Moody,” I think. A word I heard so many times at her age. I felt her inexplicable sadness. I heard the word “moody” in my head, and the sadness sunk into my flesh until my heart pumped it through my system. I breathed sadness as I read on.
Dear Diary: You keep me up, but do you keep me up?
I know that when I write in a diary frequently, it’s hard to turn my brain off when I wake at midnight, after just an hour’s sleep. Like tonight. Writing keeps the brain moving. So what does that mean for Lara? Did her brain keep moving in the wrong direction because of her diary writing? Did all that writing about how awful she felt just lead to more awful feeling? I spent five hours reading her diaries today, and I don’t know, yet.
We generally hold the idea that writing about what ails you can heal you. But a study done in the UK in 2002 of potential health benefits of written emotional expression (Sheffield, Duncan, Thomson, and Johal) concludes that keeping a diary is bad for your health. Emotive writing, they argue, is linked to decline in positive mood, and an increase in physical symptoms of poor health.
Is it? Well for one, when writing through something that’s bothering me, I’m more apt to wake up and stay up, the way I have tonight. Wakefulness has not been a stranger while wrestling with the emotions that drive me to write. And Lara, too.
Lara, Age 14: *
...I don't know whether this gift of emotion is a burden or a
treasure. I guess both. I guess I'd rather feel awful than not feel at
all...
Fear: something that can be actually helpful if controlled. Basically,
I've kept it under control. Except for things like war, and well,
other things that I don't think it would be right to not be afraid of.
Being afraid of war keeps me against it, or is it the other way
around...
I need sleep...
Molly, Age 17:
I have insomnia. Not the useful type that lets you have a few more hours in the day because you can't sleep, but the detrimental type that leaves you fuzzy all day, not being productive, instead leaving you useless, unable to rest or work, but just act like a living vegetable.
Of course, lack of sleep is not healthy. Tonight though, the threat feels larger than lost sleep. The thing about tonight is, Lara’s in the room. I can feel her here, pressuring me to say something—not that I can see her. Much of my bedroom is white shapes illumined by the street light outside: white blinds, white duvet, white carpet, white bookcase. But I don’t see Lara as a ghostly white shape. If I did, she would stand tall and thin, her straight blond hair framing a narrow face with eyes that accuse but seem to be amused at the same time, a tall neck, a full bottom lip. I don’t see her there, but there’s something tangible in the air between where I lie on the bed and the book case. I can feel it. The sense she’s there has me so scared, I can barely draw in a breath. I think that I should get up, walk around, dispel the sleepy sense that my husband and I are not alone here, but I can’t move a muscle. Through her words, reaching through time, Lara’s come to stand in my dark bedroom and haunt me.
(Continued in Writing Ourselves Into Being: The Girls' Diary Project)