![]() ![]() But, while announcing what you ate for breakfast will quickly bore those who follow you on Twitter, and writing a status update detailing just how you felt about that friend or family member who annoyed you yesterday afternoon may cause them to un-friend you on Facebook, a diary makes no judgements. To use a diary to record the worst effects of your disability, unmitigated by all the delights of life, would be to make a monument to your own misery – and would (quite literally in my case) become what Enoch Powell wrongly said writing any diary is like: “returning to one's own vomit”.ĭiaries can seem outdated in the age of blogs and social media. These doctors are to be smiled at, and nodded to, and instantly ignored. The diary was better than therapy it pushed me forward through mental pain that had been holding me back.ĭoctors unaware of the realities of the lives of the chronically ill often suggest we waste what little energy we have noting down exactly how unwell we feel each day, how much we sleep and how little we do, so that they may study the results. I knew from re-reading the pages I'd written that I was doing interesting things – and I began to ensure I kept doing them simply to have something to write about. For all I achieved, I thought, I might as well not be alive at all.Īfter a few months of storing up the previously unrecorded richness of my life, my diary simply disproved that. I felt I had no reason to go to sleep at night and no reason to wake up in the morning. Each day seemed empty, and indistinguishable from the one before it. My depression told me my existence was filthy and barren. It was the doctor charged with helping me overcome the debilitating depression inflicted by the effects of my physical illnesses who first insisted I keep a diary, making a record of the positive events in my life, however small they seemed. This doesn't mean that I use my diary to moan to myself about lost opportunities and unpleasant symptoms: again, quite the opposite. I had been struggling with my health, and feeling like my life was beginning to dribble away, and I knew from previous experience that writing a diary would help. ![]() I didn't do this because I had more free time, or a sudden slew of happy events to record, but quite the opposite. On Christmas Eve, I restarted a hobby I'd neglected for too long: keeping a diary. Here, he writes about how his favourite pastime has also proven to be the best medicine. Writer and editor, 29-year-old, Scott Jordan Harris, spends the majority of his time in bed due to severe ME and other illnesses. From the BBC ‘Ouch!' blog, 12 January 2012 (words by Scott Jordan Harris).
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