I found my childhood diary a few weeks ago, or to be precise, my mom found it in her attic and handed it over to me. Reading it felt vaguely like that story I saw recently about a man who photoshops himself into his childhood photos. I probably bought the diary at the Scholastic Book Fair. It’s lavender and has a little lock and key, though the flimsy lock was long broken. As expected, it was full of stupid observations (My crush in fourth grade apparently had really great hair) and dumb questions (Why does my sister always steal my stuff?) scattered with occasional big unanswerable ones (Am I weird or does everyone feel this way?). What struck me as I was reading it were two things: the endearment with which I wrote to an inanimate audience of blank pages and then the jarring pivot that occurred in early adolescence as I swallowed some outside judge and birthed an inner critic.
I’ve been writing about this already. In the book draft that has become another book draft, the chapter on adolescence is what steered the whole project in a new direction and still hangs as an unfinished lynchpin. So I’ve already been digging there and wondering if my memory is false when it sees that time in my life as some kind of sudden turn, but then there it was in real time on the pages of my childhood diary, and I couldn’t deny it. I can see my own voice moving along for years pouring messy feelings into this little locked book, and then eventually every page became
I need to be better
I shouldn't
if only I could make myself be another way
I can’t believe I used to do that
I did the wrong thing
its wrong to feel that way
I should work harder.
Should-ing all over myself and aiming for some elusive, unattainable bullseye. It became so extreme that I couldn't even hear my real voice anymore by the end of reading it. I had an authentic voice with my immature bubble handwriting, and then as I grew, it disappeared. I’m not sure how she vanished so fast, but she did.
Reading it was cringe, as my 14 year old son would say, because it felt like some Jekyll and Hyde transformation where there was suddenly not only one of me with my secret wants and needs and dreams and desires but two– the me with the feelings and then the louder me telling her to shut up and try harder. Seeing the little kid handwriting get hijacked by that critical voice did something to me. I think it stings because a diary is a private thing, and it feels like such a violation to see that critic on the page from the mind of a thirteen-year-old who, truth be told, probably should have pushed herself a lot less instead of a little more. It makes me feel like no space is safe from that critical influence. I mean if my own young mind wasn’t free to be a secret reflection of my truest self, what is? No place is safe.
One way that teaching has changed since I began 20 years ago is that there’s a lot of talk these days about “safe spaces,” and some of that rhetoric seems to imply that safe means free of triggers, protected and sanitized. But I see safe spaces differently in my classroom and always have. The feeling I work hard to foster there is not a space where I promise we will never be offended or challenged and always say the perfect response, but instead a room where we are free to talk about hard things and sit in discomfort, to risk looking ignorant and inexperienced as we figure it out, to question ideas we have always accepted as truth, and to sort out our own thoughts and learn how to be brave enough to communicate them on the page.
And as the conversations with my own kids change shape as they age, I see the same is true at home. I want safety to mean something else in our house, not a bubble where they are always happy and protected from the world, but a space where they feel safe saying what they feel and asking questions they’re afraid to ask elsewhere. There are a million ways I get it wrong as a mother and feel like a mediocre beginner everyday, but every time my kids reveal something to me or ask me something I never in a million years would have felt free to ask my own parents, I think maybe I’m doing something right after all. Sometimes they drive me crazy, and I say something I shouldn’t. We can never find matching socks and I’m always turning in school forms at the last minute and the house is never as clean as I’d like it to be. But they talk to me. Even in these years of closed doors and eye rolls, they aren’t entirely scared to be seen. And that is not an accident; I’ve created that space deliberately.
It’s funny we build these lives with ideals and priorities and goals, and often they are led by some inner motivation that remains hidden from us because we never unpack it. I never really thought much about why I was so determined to create that particular kind of freedom in my classroom for decades or why openness without judgment has been the one non-negotiable in my parenting aim. But reading that diary made me consider that maybe it’s because I’ve never had that space for myself anywhere, even in my own head. I don’t think this is anyone’s fault; it’s just how life unfolded for me. Hard lessons absorbed in a very young mind, adultified early years, eldest daughter golden child high achiever role, parents who did the best they could but were struggling with their own difficulties and had no bandwidth for mine, and the repercussions of a childhood steeped in intense religious rhetoric. It makes me think about that movie Inside Out that I used to watch with my kids when they were little, but with an additional character who is probably very thin with perfectly pressed hair and manicured nails and ironed clothes, and she never gets angry but has a clipboard where she keeps a list of all the things I need to work on. For years I let her sit at the control panel and narrate my life with reminders of all the ways I could be better and how important it was that I do the right thing in every moment to stay safe.
I follow Stasia Savasuk’s work sometimes, and she said something recently that I can’t stop thinking about. In regards to our urge to make “safe” choices, she said, “Pause and ask yourself what does safety truly feel like in your body?” When I close my eyes and breathe deep to think about that question, I realize my answer is that true safety feels like an exhale, a softening, an expanding, an opening. It feels like freedom. Did I ever feel that? If I did, it must have been in tiny fleeting moments or so far back in my life that it is a time buried beyond my consciousness where it’s stored in my body’s memory and nowhere else.
Now think about the many choices - big and small - that I made because I thought they felt “safe” by some outer definition. And what did that feel like? Armored, rigid, protected, restricted, shoulders tense, arms crossed … the literal opposite of that spacious exhale of true safety. Maybe we need another word because those two feelings are not the same thing at all.
I want that safety that feels like soft expansive freedom. And I think the only way to get there is to make the critical character step away from the control panel, but if that diary showed me anything it’s that the critic in me has been here for so long she can’t be easily evicted. She doesn’t like to allow anyone to get a good look at the messy parts, and that includes myself.
I approach writing as the container that holds all of my mess. One way I’ve grown since the adolescent writer in that diary is that now I don’t let my critic in the room when I write, so my voice isn’t silenced by her anymore like it was then. The best analogy I can use is that writing feels like I’m driving a stick shift, and at first, I’m in a gear where the critical voice is there and we are sputtering along and having a hard time getting anywhere. But then after a few lines, I shift to some other gear where it all clicks and another truer self is speaking, and that’s when I really start to move. The critic is still here, I know. But I throw her in the backseat (or when I’m really doing it right, I lock her in the trunk) as some deeper part of me drives the words forward to wherever the road leads. I rely so much on writing as a way to make sense of my life and, in the retelling, I take my agency back from situations where I had none. And thank God for that because it has saved me over and over again. But lately I’m seeing that creating a narrative to make sense of something is not remotely the same as revealing my process as it happens in real time. No one gets to see that mess.
I always say, to steal Joan Didion’s words, that I don’t know what I think until I see what I write and “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.” And I stand by that. I have to write it down to know what I think about something. But what about what I feel? Thinking isn’t feeling. I dress up my feelings by stringing words together and attaching them to thoughts. But rarely do I let the feeling just sit there naked and unadorned, which is the true definition of a safe space.
What’s ironic is that I write and write to try and get to the heart of the thing, and the heart of the thing is always just a feeling. Which was there in the first place begging for some air and wanting to be seen, but I have to shovel the thoughts aside to see it. I wish I could just let the feeling breathe first, let it out, let it be seen even if it's ugly. Let it talk to me without writing 1500 words to find it.
So I guess this is an attempt at that and a moment to say ouch it hurts to read that kid’s diary so crowded with the cage of the inner critic that it wouldn’t let her speak. To say that I wish I could rewind the tape, scoop that girl up and reparent her, tell her to stop trying to be good. That it hurts to think about the years stolen by that voice, the decisions made, the moments forever lost to it, the way it sucks all the air out of the room in my head. That I hate her for all the lies she told me about how right choices and perfection could keep me safe when that wasn’t true at all and nothing was ever even right or wrong. It just was. And that maybe creating these spaces for my students and my own kids has fallen short in its twisted attempt to somehow redeem my former self because it’s too late to go back, and I’ll never know what those years would have felt like if I’d actually let my feelings and desires breathe instead of burying them in I shoulds. That in my worst moments, I still wonder if she will ever just let me relax and unclench my fists and open my hands to receive.
I love my parents to pieces. They absolutely made a safe space for me, and still do. But where it was safe in the sense of how we normally definie safety, it was not so much in the sense of sharing ideas and speaking to my own emotions or feelings -- and even in my 30's now, that hasn't changed. It's not their fault. There was just so much judgement and denial early on, so many teachings of things that were considered innappropriate, especially as a woman, in a southern religious family. Not to say that there isn't unconditional love, but I do grieve the conversations we could have had.
It sounds like what you're providing for your own is invaluable. And as a previous student, you absolutely fostered that safe place in the classroom too--that challenged and inspired thought and helped us develop empathy and that paved the way for other english classes that would continue to inspire the same and provide a space I didn't have with my family. I've kept a journal ever since I was little, and the changes in my thoughts really started to happen as I delved more into my education and degree. Shoulds are so hard and sadly we cannot travel back to talk to ourselves about these things, but in some sense looking back is a bit of time travel (Carl Sagan style) -- the previous self is helping out the present.