What I learnt from my teenage diaries

{"text":[[{"start":5.2,"text":"“I know my face is lined,” I wrote on November 6 1987, from a university library. I was doing no work because I was, apparently, suffering from Oxford’s marshy “pestilential air”. It was the start of the final year of university, and my mind was on the future: “It is not today I think about, but next year. Where? How much? Why? How can I commit myself to anything that will compromise my need to be me?”"}],[{"start":30.384,"text":"As I read this in 2026 — and once I’d stopped eyerolling — I realised that my ideals at 20 were exactly that: idealistic and solipsistic. And why not? I had accidentally captured a moment of peak youth."}],[{"start":44.374,"text":"There have been many other moments of both cringe and revelation during my recent project to read all the diaries I kept as a young woman. After decades locked in two big trunks, the notebooks have been dusted off. For the moment, they sit on my bedroom shelves, the past in plain sight."}],[{"start":62.079,"text":"I began writing aged 10, in 1977. An early entry: “January 28th, Saturday: Went to Birmingham with Clare [friend]. We went to lots of museums and I got a ring with a reproduction of an Anglo-Saxon coin on it.” This is already on-brand for me, a museum nerd."}],[{"start":79.36,"text":"The diary entries stopped abruptly in 2005, after my toddler son became critically ill. He recovered, but I was too broken to think about writing. It would be 20 years before I started again — by which time diaries had been recast as journals; part of a “daily wellness practice”, as we didn’t say in the 1980s. In 2025, when I bought that new notebook, the children had grown up and my marriage had just ended. There was a lot to write about."}],[{"start":107.28,"text":"Recently, I’ve found the headspace to think about the future. As part of that process, I decided to go backwards. Do I have anything to learn from the person I was at the start of adulthood? Could my early passions, ideas and mistakes illuminate my way through what the academic and author Herminia Ibarra calls “The Bonus Years”?"}],[{"start":124.768,"text":"In Ibarra’s forthcoming book of that title, she offers guidance to help us through the inevitable transitions of our fifties and sixties, in both life and work. In my case, it’s been an uncomfortable personal shift from settled married mid-life to an unknown future. When in transition, Ibarra says, we are “reaching for the next bar of the trapeze”, even though we aren’t ready to jump."}],[{"start":148.223,"text":"Can I see, for example, negative patterns of past behaviour that have persisted — and can I learn to change? The French have a useful phrase for this: “reculer pour mieux sauter” — taking a step back to leap forward."}],[{"start":161.43,"text":"My daughter spotted them before I did. Dipping into the notebooks alongside me, she said, with brutal clarity: “You were such a wet wipe.” I was: there are pages and pages of miserable passivity; waiting for men to call, craving approval from my friends, and desperately wanting to please my bosses. Agency and confidence come with age, but sometimes those old insecurities persist."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":186,"text":"Another pattern jumps out: “I don’t say what I really feel” was a standard admission after any disagreement. Back then, there were huge blow-ups over non-communication, or my carelessness with others’ feelings, evidenced by ink smudged with tears. We were all young, of course, and feeling our way into adulthood — but I can also see that I usually trusted my thoughts to the page, not to the person, including those I loved most. I still find writing easier than talking."}],[{"start":213.209,"text":"One of the privileges of age (there are a few) is that our past is analogue. We in Generation X were lucky to have the freedom to grow into adulthood without everything being documented online. The past sits in our heads and in boxes. I took a lot of photos back then, but most of them are faded or blurred. One of the joys of opening the diaries was finding photos and letters from friends, tucked inside the pages, that I hadn’t seen for decades. The young faces were beautiful; as was the handwriting in the letters."}],[{"start":242.24,"text":"A couple of months ago, I picked up The Deptford Trilogy by the Canadian author Robertson Davies, from a second-hand bookshop. It had appealed immediately on the shelf — chunky, full of ideas, proper plots — and was already sitting on my “TBR” pile when I found the diary note of everything I read over the 1987 summer break. There were five titles by Davies, including The Deptford Trilogy, and also The Bell by Iris Murdoch. I had also recently bought that one. I am feeling a pull back to her work, but also to the similarly big 1970s and 1980s narratives of Davies — a kind of wider reclaiming; his work, unlike Murdoch’s, is very much out of fashion."}],[{"start":285.34,"text":"We also have to move forward with our lives; often, in this AI era, at speed — but I am enjoying going backwards, too. I’ve even learnt to accept and forgive that achingly pretentious 20-year-old: “How delicious these long days will seem in retrospect,” she wrote in that long-ago November, “as the silent preparation for the future goes on.”"}],[{"start":285.84,"text":"Isabel Berwick is FT Working It editor and author of ‘The Future-Proof Career’"}],[{"start":310.139,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":321.6,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793496865_7509.mp3"}