The Diary I Was Too Ashamed to Let Anyone Read

I wasn’t writing a diary. I was documenting the parts of myself I believed no one could love.

The notebook beneath my mattress held the truth I wasn’t yet brave enough to live.

There was a notebook. Plain, spiral-bound, the kind you buy for eighty-nine cents in the school supply aisle because it doesn’t look like anything worth stealing or snooping through. I kept mine tucked between the mattress and the box spring on my side of the bed, the side closest to the wall, because I figured if anyone ever went looking for something to be suspicious of, they’d check my purse first.

I started filling it in the fall of 2008, back when my husband was gone three weeks out of four hauling freight across states I couldn’t have found on a map, and I was home with a baby who wouldn’t stop crying and a body that wouldn’t stop eating past the point of hunger into the point of numbness. I wrote things in that notebook I have never said out loud to another living person. Not my mother. Not my husband. Not the one friend I trusted enough to tell almost everything.

I wrote that some nights I resented my husband’s profession as he built his trucking company and he needed me so much it felt like drowning, that I had no energy for my own work and private practice. I wrote that I hoped, just for one week, nobody would need anything from me at all — not dinner, not comfort, not a wife, not a mother, not even a phone call. I wrote about food the way other people write about affairs: the secrecy, the shame spiral after, the promises to myself that this was the last time. I wrote that I sometimes wondered if I’d made a mistake with my whole life and then hated myself for wondering it.

If anyone had read that notebook back then, I would have wanted to disappear out of shame. Not embarrassed. Erased. Because those weren’t cute confessions. They weren’t the kind of thing you say at a women’s retreat with a cup of chamomile tea in your hand while everyone nods along. Those were the thoughts you’re supposed to swallow, the ones that prove you’re ungrateful, unstable, a bad mother, a worse wife. I believed that so completely that I hid a notebook that didn’t even have a lock on it, because it was eighty-nine cents, somewhere no one would think to look for shame.

I never wrote it to be read. That’s the part people don’t understand about that season of my life. I wasn’t drafting anything. I wasn’t building toward a memoir or a blog or a following. I was a woman standing in her kitchen at midnight with a diaper bag still packed by the door and a husband three states away, and the only place I could set down what I was actually carrying from holding our long-distance marriage together was a page nobody else would ever open.

I used to tear pages out sometimes. Rip them into pieces small enough that even if someone found them in the trash, they couldn’t piece the sentence back together. I did that with the worst ones. The ones about wanting to leave this world. The ones about not recognizing my own face in the mirror and feeling lost in my relationships, not just my married life. I destroyed the evidence of my own honesty because I was more afraid of being known for having needs, desires, opinions, and dreams than I was of being alone with it.

I still have that notebook, minus the pages I tore out in a panic one Friday afternoon, convinced my husband was going to come home early and find it. It’s water-stained now, the spiral rusted at one end. I don’t open it often. When I do, I don’t recognize the handwriting. It’s smaller than mine is now, cramped, like even my penmanship was trying to take up less space. Back then, shrinking was my norm and even showed up in my journaling.

I used to think the shame was about what I wrote. It wasn’t. The shame was about being seen as anything other than fine, having it all together. The notebook was the only place fine wasn’t required.

If you have a version of that notebook somewhere — a note on your phone you’ve never shown anyone, a folder titled something boring so no one would click on it, a page you’ve torn out and thrown away more than once — I’m not going to tell you to share it. I just want you to know it was never proof that something was wrong with you. It was proof you were still in there, trying to get out.

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About The Author:  Dr. Nikki LeToya White MSEd-TL, Ph.D. RHN is the founder, director, and full-time board-certified trauma-informed nutritionist, folk herbalist, and wellness consultant at Spiced Life Conversation Art Wellness Studio and Botanica. She created Spiced Life Conversation, LLC Art Wellness Studio, and Botanica to provide the Metro Atlanta area with counseling and coaching services where clients are carefully matched with the right program for healing abandonment and childhood emotional neglect trauma that cause codependency, emotional eating, financial stress, and imposter syndrome as it relates to the fear of success and being abandon. We help you begin your emotional healing journey with ease. Recently, we have expanded to include an online membership site so we now provide support to people living all over the world. All of our recovery coaches provide at least one evidence-based treatment to assist in your recovery. Dr. White is a big proponent of self-care and helping people live a fulfilling life! She has been in full remission with both codependency and emotional binge eating disorder since 2016. In living a life in recovery from sugar addiction. I love my low-sugar balanced lifestyle.

Best Regards

Dr. Nikki LeToya White