The private diary: from life coping tool to research resource

The private diary: from life coping tool to research resource

Until a few months ago, my diaries and I had been inseparable for more than 60 years. We had stuck together despite moving house more than 24 times in my search for peace within. Never a day apart.

The diaries were my one constant from age 12. They were my rock. At home, they stood shoulder to shoulder on the bookcase shelves. As each year drew to a close, another diary filled with 365 days of private musing would be added, and so my diary family grew. They have tracked the path of my mental illness and recovery of self, and in my mid-fifties, they became a ready resource for my PhD, books and blog posts about eating disorders.
In March this year, things changed.
My collection of private diaries received an invitation. They vacated my bookshelves and, packed into sturdy cardboard boxes, they departed for Australia’s capital city, Canberra, a day’s drive by courier, to reside in the National Library of Australia.
Encouraged by the NLA curator, Jemma, I agreed to place my diaries in the library’s care immediately. Jemma said my diaries would be of interest to researchers, especially because of my decades of documented experience with anorexia nervosa and the various treatments I underwent to recover my healthy self.
As manuscript material, my collection (both restricted and non-restricted parts) would only be delivered through the National Library’s Special Collections Reading Room, a specialised space with a higher level of staff monitoring to ensure that material is being used appropriately.
The diaries were expected to be accessible to the public “later this year”, so imagine my surprise when Jemma  wrote this week:

I have some exciting news – the Papers of June Alexander has been processed and is now available for readers to access! Our wonderful cataloguing staff have also created a useful finding aid, which will provide readers with a detailed guide to what’s in the collection (this is accessed by clicking on the ‘Finding aid at National Library of Australia’ link).
So, from now on, your collection will be available through the Library’s catalogue and Trove.
The easiest way to find your archived website is to search for the URL in Trove.

Wow!
I read this email message several times before clicking on the link for June Alexander’s papers.
I’m accustomed to reaching for a diary in the privacy of my home, but now I will reach for a diary remotely, in another much larger home open to all. I feel nervous but excited, too.

Upon entering TROVE, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, wandering about, curious upon curious, clicking on links, seeing where each path takes me within the amazing forest of archives, and discovering the wealth of knowledge therein. I feel honoured that my diaries are in this safe, ‘forever’ place.

Part of my papers and diaries are available for research; part requires permission for research during my lifetime, and part is temporarily unavailable for preservation reasons.

The NLA summary reads:

This collection comprises handwritten diary entries by June Alexander, who grew up on a dairy farm and wrote about family, working and rural life from age 12 until 2016. The handwritten diaries are complemented by ephemera, letters and email printouts, photographs of family and friends, digital diaries (2015-2023) and letters (1998-2009). The personal diaries form the basis for her memoir, documenting struggles with mental health, an eating disorder, relationships, studies, writing career and aspirations. There are drafts, publisher letters and a signed published copy of June’s 2009 memoir Girl Called Tim. Newspaper clippings of articles both about and by June are interfiled in the diaries. There are two early schoolbooks (scrapbooks) with awards, newspaper clippings and other items relating to June’s early writings.

How my journey with the diary began

My friendship with the diary began in 1962, when, at age 11, I developed an eating disorder and began keeping a diary. However, the themes and threads that bind the story together began to weave a pattern almost as soon as I was born. In early childhood, the world through my eyes comprised a small, beautiful valley adjoining the Mitchell River National Park in Victoria, Australia. I lived on a dairy farm with my parents and sister.

For my first 11 years, my home had no electricity, television, or Internet, but my days were full. The farm, river, and adjacent bushland provided a natural outdoor playground, seeding my imagination. Indoors, on rainy days and at night by lantern light, at the solid oak kitchen table, I would ask my mother for pen and paper and write a note or two about my day. A friendship with words was already taking hold.

When my formal education began at age five, my world expanded.

A two-and-a-half-mile bicycle ride along a gravel lane out of the valley led to a sturdy, one-room, one-teacher, 20-pupil school. Here, my love of words intensified, and the happiest days were when new books arrived for the school’s small library. At age nine, a prize of a pen in a national story-writing competition fuelled my writing passion and broadened my horizons. I learnt that if I wrote well, acknowledgement might follow.

Soon, my stories, based on observations of adventurous wombats and other aspects of my daily life, appeared in publications like the Sydney-based The Australian Children’s Newspaper.

Both my parents had left school at the age of 14 to milk cows on neighbouring farms. I never saw either of them reading a book. My mother wrote letters to family and friends, and my father read newspapers, but this was the only evidence of the written word in our family home. I did not have the opportunity to visit a municipal library until I began secondary school at age 12. To their credit, however, my parents tolerated my literary interest and provided pens, writing pads and stamps.

Words were my friends

Pen-friendships in far-off lands, including the United States and Germany, letters and articles to newspapers, and essay competitions provided other outlets for expressive writing as I entered adolescence. Words were my friends because they were safe and accommodating, did not judge and did anything I wanted them to.

Early in 1962, the year before I began secondary school, my world changed. The teacher’s announcement of an impending school doctor visit worried me. I felt terrified about undressing for what was a routine medical test in the vicinity of my teacher, a male cousin who boarded with us.

My mother and sister were dismissive when I expressed concern, and my anxiety intensified to the point where one day, while sitting alone on the grassy school ground bordered by tall pine trees, my tension suddenly eased. Anorexia nervosa was developing and providing me with a coping skill.

With each new day, I progressively ate less and exercised more. In this way, my fears were suppressed as my focus moved from worrying about the doctor’s visit to calculating what I could eat and how many hours I needed to exercise each day. Several months later, the school doctor came and went, but my terror of eating remained, for the process of disconnection of my identity from my body had begun.

The diary and the anorexia were coping tools, but one was malevolent

I did not understand why I was afraid to eat or why I could not sit still. My frustrated mother criticised my behaviour and compounded my guilt. I retreated and became withdrawn. Then, the Christmas gift of a diary provided a reprieve. I now had somewhere to offload and store the calorie numbers and food and exercise rules that were cluttering and dominating my mind. The pen and paper provided an external connection, a tangible recording tool.

Until now, the eating disorder thoughts had been internalised, but the diary offered a private place to externalise them as well; the mere act of writing the figures and words on the page allowed a sense of control and easing of anxiety, however brief. In this way, the diary, like the eating disorder, became a coping mechanism for meeting the demands of daily life.

The first little book became what seemed an immediate, trusted friend. It marked the start of a literary journey that, over the next 40-plus years, would chronicle the loss and recovery of identity and self.

About my diary

Just one word described how I felt about my first diary. Excitement. The entry for January 1, 1963, is crammed with details of food consumed, exercise taken, the time of awakening and going to bed, and the cricket results.

Other entries in this first year of diary writing include matter-of-fact mentions of friends and family and observations, including the weather, the start of secondary school education in seventh grade, my father’s seasonal farming activities, the number of hen eggs collected, and the days in the week when I bathe or wash my hair. By the end of 1963, when I transitioned into full-blown anorexia-bulimia, more self-expression was evident.

In adolescence, words tumble out, trying to make sense of thoughts and feelings. The limitation of one page a day is sometimes a challenge—my handwriting gets smaller and smaller as the end of the page approaches. My world is small. There is the diary and me. Not for many years would I learn there was also the eating disorder and that the diary’s influence extended far beyond the two of us. The illness, like the diary, thrived on privacy and encouraged the keeping of secrets.

As a child and young woman, my diaries were safe places to express and analyse thoughts and develop coping strategies. But confiding in the diary also strengthened the eating disorder, its unrelenting and stringent demands becoming increasingly impossible to meet. Nothing I did was enough and the rules of the illness became secrets within secrets that had to be guarded and hidden from others.

Breaking the silence

By age 28, my diary recorded an almost complete disconnection of self from body. Outwardly, I presented as a wife and mother with a full-time career, but within, the diary revealed a desperate struggle to honour daily lists and pledges, such as having a strict weight limit, running a set distance, and noting every calorie.

Thoughts of suicide after 17 years with the disorder drove me to break the silence and reveal the thoughts hitherto confined to my diaries to a doctor. Upon learning I kept a diary, he and other doctors encouraged the continuance of such writing as a tool for expression. However, like me, they were ignorant of the diary’s potential to play a pivotal role in my illness and of its ability to be a foe as well as a friend.

Eventually, in my 30s, a psychiatrist gained my trust and suggested I could use the diary to assist the healing process by drawing on it and engaging in written communication with him. Gradually, aided by patient and therapeutic guidance, what I wrote in my diary began to reconnect with my thoughts and feelings. Self-abuse and self-harm gave way to self-care as my body and mind progressively reintegrated.

The diary’s ‘Coming Out’

Decades later, at age 55, upon healing sufficiently to re-enter life’s mainstream, I departed a journalism career to reflect on these decades of diary-writing and write a memoir. As I ‘came out’ and began to share my story publicly, the diaries ‘came out’ too. For instance, besides providing the main data source for my memoir, A Girl Called Tim (2011), they became a resource pool of documented ‘lived experience’, assisting the dissemination of science-based knowledge and evidence-based treatments in books for health professionals and mainstream readers.

In another outcome, the creation of a website as a companion to the memoir led to people with experience of eating disorders writing to say they had ‘connected’ with my story in a way that gave them ‘permission’ to share their stories until now revealed only, if at all, in their diary.

A tool for self-healing and renewal

Many adult readers wrote at length, explaining they had felt isolated and had kept their eating disorders a secret for decades, but upon reading and identifying with my story, they were able to share and externalise their thoughts and experiences for the first time.

Reflecting on the readers’ responses sparked recognition that perhaps my friend the diary had been destructive as well as constructive throughout my long illness. This revelation, in turn, became the catalyst for my PhD research project, investigating how diary entries might be used in writing a book exploring how the process of diary writing can be a tool for self-healing and renewal.

Eight years after completing my PhD on the diary’s usefulness as a therapeutic tool in eating disorder recovery, my diaries are settling into their new home in the national library.

I look forward to next January when my family and I will travel to Canberra to visit them.

About TROVE

Canberra’s National Library of Australia’s free online discovery service, Trove, is widely used by Australian residents and the international community. Since its launch in late 2009, Trove (trove.nla.gov.au) has become the National Library of Australia’s (NLA) most popular online service. Trove is a single entry point to a treasure trove of artifacts, curiosities and stories from Australia’s cultural, community and research institutions. Search digitally across millions of newspapers, journals, books, pictures, maps, and many other items, including copies of letters, diaries and personal archives.

REFERENCE
Part of this article is drawn from my exegesis:
Using writing as a therapy for eating disorders: The Diary Healer and the process of using personal diary excerpts to assist people with eating disorders. https://hdl.handle.net/10018/1211443