Keeping A Personal Library

From a very young age, I’ve had a fear of forgetting things. Not little things, like what I need to take with me when I leave the house, or the door code at university, but the details of my life: how I survived the traumatic breakup of a friendship, how I felt at the concert of my favourite singer, what I was thinking when I started going to therapy. The little details of the big events, the things that have made me who I am.

To that end, I kept diaries. I’ve done so my whole life but the catalyst for my compulsive writing occurred just before I turned nineteen, when I was forced to take a gap year because my anxiety, depression, and social anxiety had become so bad that I just couldn’t cope with the course I’d intended to do. Suddenly I had a lot of empty time and a lot of chaotic thoughts to fill it. So I started filling notebooks, with stories, moments, quotes, and memories that I was terrified of forgetting. I would write non-stop for days, until either I fell asleep over the pages, or my hand cramped up so badly that I just couldn’t keep going.

While it was clearly an odd behaviour, no one, not even myself, thought much about it. I’d always been a writer, having written my first ‘book’ before the age of six. I’d gone on to write a twenty thousand word story at twelve, and since then, I’ve experimented with poetry, essay writing, blogging, and pretty much any other kind of writing you can think of. Now, at the age of twenty-three, songwriting is my true love, but my passion has always been for words: to express, to describe, to explain. So writing a lot wasn’t weird.

But as my anxiety in particular got worse, I tried to write even more. I’d write down the most minute details: what I ate at every meal, the plot intricacies of the TV show I was watching, the lyrics of each new song I listened to. I was absolutely terrified of forgetting each detail that had contributed to the person I was that I felt compelled to write everything down, so that I didn’t lose one single puzzle piece. It was taking up all of my time, literally, and that was without anything particularly significant happening.

When significant things did happen – the disintegration of an important relationship, the death of my much-loved cat, the introduction of a new medication – the writing became a serious problem. Over that period of approximately a week, I wrote about ninety pages, and over twenty thousand words. It’s true that I was working all the emotion out, figuring out how I felt – for me, writing is the best way of processing stuff since I can’t write as fast as I think, giving me the time to really think everything through as I write it down – but it was taking over my life. Still, I didn’t think anything of it. It was what I had to do to get through some really hard stuff. And even if I’d wanted to, I don’t think I could’ve stopped.

In September 2014, I started university. Suddenly things were happening. A lot of things. I was commuting to London, meeting literally hundreds of new people, and taking a load of new classes on subjects I’d never studied before. I also had a huge amount of homework; I felt like I was working all the time. So trying to write about everything that was happening became an impossible task. But not doing it caused me suffocating anxiety. It was a catch-22, and it took me months to catch up with myself. In January 2015, this was diagnosed as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

In the last four years, I’ve written over a million words. Over time, with some good medication, a fantastic therapist, and a lot of hard work, I’ve become better at managing the anxiety and I’ve become better at managing the compulsion. I no longer need to write down what I eat for every meal, what I do every minute of every day, although I still struggle against including every song lyric I love (I’m a songwriter – it’s research, right?!). But having said that, I still need to write a lot about how I’m feeling and how certain events make me feel. It really helps my frantic brain slow down and understand everything that’s happening to me. Of course, there are still certain things that cause my writing to go into overdrive. For example, I wrote more than twenty pages after a recent ninety-minute therapy session.

I have a complicated relationship with my writing. Writing is something I enjoy, and keeping a diary is a positive experience for me. But it’s the compulsion to do it, the unbearable anxiety when I don’t, the constant panic that I’ll forget things… These things make my life miserable. The longer I go without writing, the harder it feels to breathe. Having a complete history of your life, being able to go back to an important moment and remember how you felt… it sounds nice, right? Well, it would be if I had any choice in the matter.