My appointment diary will never be replaced by apps and platforms. It is the only true record of the minutiae of my life.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Images by Tina Tiller.

I bumped into an old friend and former colleague recently. We hadn’t seen each other in years. There was a lot to catch up on: births, deaths, divorces; the usual stuff of life.

She was in a rush, but keen to meet again. “How about next Wednesday morning?” she said, checking her phone. “Excellent,” I replied, running through commitments in my head. The following day she sent me a meeting request through Outlook. The event was labelled, “Walk, Talk and Coffee”. The meeting was scheduled to start at 9.30 and end at 10.30. I had the option of replying, “Yes”, “No” or “Maybe.” I ticked “Yes.” 

I looked at my paper diary, always on my desk. For the proposed catchup, I’d scrawled, “Meet M”, with a smiley face. I’d blanked out the whole morning. In my experience, catch-ups with old friends take time. 

But the encounter made me think: when did our personal lives become so professional? And have office tools now become so much a part of our private lives that spontaneous encounters, romantic liaisons, and catchups over coffee are reduced to fit the format of an app?  Perhaps next time we meet for coffee, we will have Goals and Actions to complete. 

Like most people (apart from my brother-in-law, who refuses to engage in technology’s inexorable march towards disaster) my life has been almost entirely digitised in the past two decades. I no longer have a landline and I engage with members of the family on all their preferred apps. I click, share and post, acknowledging the benefits of convenience and speed. 

But on one thing, I remain obdurate: the importance – no, necessity – of a paper diary, the last bastion of pen and paper that reflects and records in our own hand the minutiae of our personal lives.    

December 10, 2003: Order lamb for Christmas. Will Mark do spuds?

In my bookcase, as I write, there are 23 appointment diaries. The year 2004 is missing for some reason, but the others are precisely lined up like the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the family bookcase when I was growing up.

 The styles are varied. Some are businesslike black or burgundy Moleskines with soft rounded corners, a matching ribbon bookmark and ivory paper. They are functional and non-gender specific, denoting a serious period in my career as a journalist and editor when I didn’t want or need the distraction of pretty art or proverbs.

From 2007, the style changes, reflecting a more balanced lifestyle. For several years, I worked in Italy as a WWOOFer (Willing Worker on Organic Farms), so the diaries between 2008 and 2012 feature pictures of gondola, castello and basilica. From 2013, for seven years, The Reading Woman diary took over: a beautiful production by Pomegranate Publishers with portraits of women through the ages reading, accompanied by quotations.

Those who are happy enough to have a taste for reading, need never be at loss for amusement – Marie de Sévigné.

When that diary ceased to be published, I was crushed. On impulse, I branched out in a bookshop in Auckland. The Perpetual Disappointments Diary (Picador) looked quirky. The blurb implied it was the lovechild of pessimists, cynics, and losers. The Guardian described is as “cheerily depressing”; the New York Times added, “Abandon hope, all ye who buy it.” I bought it anyway.

It drove me nuts. For starters, in the year of my purchase, each page began on a Tuesday and ended on a Monday. The days weren’t labelled so I had to count on my fingers to see where Thursday fell. Motivational quotes included: “Who would play you in the fish-out-of-water, crime-caper screwball comedy TV movie of your life?” and “If you found out you only had one day to live, roughly what time would you get up?” There were contact pages for People Who Never Call, Real Enemies, and Imaginary Friends, and a New Year planning section titled The Gaping Void Ahead. I abandoned it in May. 

Last year, I bought the beautiful New Zealand Engagement Diary (Live Wires New Zealand) with illustrations by New Zealand artist Tanya Wolfkamp. This year a friend gave me Mauri Ora (Potton and Burton Publishing), a diary in te reo Māori and English, featuring whakataukī; sayings that capture generations of wisdom from te ao Māori. I love it. 

September 19, 2018: Women’s Suffrage speech at Te Aroha Lions Club

By rights, paper diaries should have disappeared with the advent of digital diaries and planners. Online apps enable us to plan and record every aspect of our lives and synchronise with others in our network. Unlike paper diaries, the space allowed for entries is never too long or too short. You can also encrypt, password protect, and otherwise lock up your personal information, avoiding someone flipping through the pages of your paper diary and seeing that you lied about a meeting after work.

But in the same way books have defied tech companies promises that e-books, apps and platforms will always and inevitably eclipse physical objects, paper diaries continue to survive and thrive. 

Jerome Corbett, head of product management at Acme Supplies New Zealand – distributors of the Italian Castelli diaries, Moleskines and the long-established (1881) Collins diaries – says in the past five years sales have been trending up. He wouldn’t be without his “high-quality diary and fine writing instrument.” Abba Renshaw, publicity manager for Allen and Unwin NZ, who produce the Faber Poetry and Royal Horticultural Society diaries, likewise is committed to a paper diary, which must have “an attractive cover, a week to a page and an elastic to close.” She writes only in pencil.

Helen Harvey, director and co-founder of Live Wires New Zealand, says, ““Everyone said Kindles would be the death of books, but that hasn’t happened. I don’t see the demise of diaries.” 

So, what makes a paper diary endure?

Emotional attachment is key for many people. My relationship with my diary begins when I buy it. I make decisions on mood, space allotted and cover design. The Moleskines are smart and functional but have no personality. My Italian series remind me of travel; the Reading Woman diaries compel me to sometimes step away from work to read a book in the way that (leisured) women have for centuries. 

Ease of access is another reason. You can leave a diary open to refer to at a glance, or easily retrieve information from a previous date. It’s often more convenient to scrawl something down.

 Paper diaries don’t need batteries. 

July 13, 2008: Wedding anniversary!!!

Writing something in your own hand has cognitive benefits. Handwriting builds memories and leads to better recall. Studies have shown people are more likely to remember information they have written by hand, rather than typed into a laptop or phone app. Writing can be a powerful tool to simplify and organise thoughts. 

My handwriting has deteriorated over the years, but it is also an accurate guide to how I felt on any day. A note scrawled in haste reflects a hectic time. Exclamation marks (sometimes highlighted in vivid colour) are a warning a notation must not be overlooked. If my life is spilling out at the edges, the writing is tighter to fit the space allowed. In contrast, during Covid lockdowns, there are leisurely italicised jottings about walks, garden chores and reminders to phone friends. There are doodles in the margins.

Diary entries bring back memories. In the week beginning August 26, 2021, my diary reminds me I went for three six-kilometre walks, had my skin checked for suspicious moles (none found), bought flowers for my sister on the anniversary of her husband’s death, and ordered an 11th wedding anniversary gift for my son and daughter-in-law (a beautiful steel kereru for their garden). I also had lunch with three former journalist friends, researched details for a surrogacy book, and spoke at a Hamilton Book Month function. The events are not remarkable, but if I had not kept a diary, I would not have remembered all this.

Other notations seem humdrum but are not. On November 20, 2020, I am reminded to “pick up Sam and Noah”, which signalled the joyous return of a son and his family to live in Aotearoa after 12 years in the UK. The carefully orchestrated pickup was from a quarantine hotel in Auckland where they’d spent the past two weeks.

Some entries bear witness to earth-shattering events. On September 11, 2001, my corporate black Moleskine diary reminds me to start work on the next year’s business plan, a task rapidly abandoned in the early hours of the following day as terrorists attacked the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

In the week beginning February 5, 2006, one entry says, “Write eulogy for mum.” 

June 17, 2011: Take muffins and champagne to Fieldays team

It is strange to look back on days preceding tragedies, when mundane events seemed noteworthy until a life-altering event occurred. But there is also comfort in seeing how life goes on throughout the days and months that follow. And there is comfort in the annual ritual of transferring anniversaries of births, deaths and marriages from one year’s diary to the next ensuring, in my lifetime at least, they will never be forgotten. 

It is also absorbing to track the changes in my own life. Before my hair went grey, two hours was blanked out each month for a cut and colour, manicures were scheduled every fortnight; regular facials, noted only as “clinic” appointments, disappeared some time ago. Sessions at the gym have been replaced by walks.           

On my death, my diaries will no doubt be destroyed. Unlike legendary screen and stage star Vivien Leigh, whose 1953 appointment diary was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for $6,784 (NZD), mine have no commercial value. They do not offer wisdom to a future generation on how to live their lives. The entries reflect only what happened on any day.  But, in that way, they are the most truthful record of my life.  

The day before I was due to meet M for a coffee catchup, I came down with a cold. With renewed concerns about another Covid variant, I phoned her and left an apology. That evening, I received another Outlook message. “This event has been cancelled.” In the space below, there was a single ‘x’.

My trauma doesn’t come with warnings. It attacks me out of nowhere when I least expect it.

The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand.

Illustrations by Devon Smith.

This essay contains descriptions of sexual assault. Please take care.

The night is a write off. At 1.48am on a Friday, I know that I won’t sleep a wink. I’ve been woken up by someone else and I can never return to a restful sleep after that. I was woken up tonight when my partner came home late from work drinks. I’m not angry about that in the slightest, I’m glad he had a fun evening with his colleagues. Even a light, fitful doze won’t come. I am wired, wide awake, and wild with anger. 

All I did today was go to work. I treated myself to a curry for lunch from the food court, completed tasks for my job, chatted with my colleagues, walked home. My life today is objectively safe. My home is safe. My day has been simple and comfortingly uneventful. Yet here I am, awake and unsettled. My mind is a fucking war zone. 

At night it is the worst. My resilience is thin when I’m deprived of rest. I feel porous. I long to return to sleep, but my mind snaps into action. I’ll lay there for an hour or two, trying to gently talk myself out of any unwanted thoughts. Sometimes I try listening to sleep stories for adults, or setting the timer on the audiobook app in the hope that I’ll doze off. Usually, I’m doomed. 

I am awake. That’s all there is to it. 

Rage at experiencing violence is never far from the surface of my skin. It simmers constantly. I have a lifetime of being used to the unsolvable fury. Trauma comes up all the time, anywhere, throughout every day I live through. 

When I was six years old, I was woken up by a man my mother had recently broken up with smashing the glass of my bedroom window. He climbed in. The neighbours heard mum and I screaming and called the police. It wasn’t the first time he’d disturbed us. That night he breached a non-molestation order (called a protection order these days) that police had previously put in place stating he couldn’t contact us. After giving statements, we fled in the dark before dawn with only the clothes on our backs. 

Mum was so unnerved that we never returned to live in that house. I changed schools to somewhere on the other side of Auckland without going back to say goodbye to my teacher or the friends I’d known since kindergarten. I lost my life as I knew it that night. 

Obviously this was shocking. The man did not physically hurt me that night, but it was unsettling, unsafe and deeply traumatic. My stepdaughter is six years old now, and the idea of anyone invading her bedroom or interrupting her sleep to scare and hurt her is so awful that the thought sets my teeth on edge and turns my shoulders to stone. It is unbearable. A six year old girl is a vulnerable thing. Small and deserving of protection and safety. I was not safe. 

Soon after the man broke in my bedroom window, he rammed his car into the side of mum’s car when we were on the motorway. No one from nearby cars helped us. I was in the backseat which had no seatbelts because the car was old and it was 1989. Mum had shakily driven to the nearest police station. He had again breached the non-molestation order that said he wasn’t allowed to contact us.

When I started working full-time as a journalist in the mid-2000s, I called mum before my first byline was published to check if I should use a pseudonym. I didn’t want that man to locate me. “No,” she told me fiercely, “you never need to hide from him again. Live your life. Use your name.”

In 2021, out of the blue, he contacted me on social media. I called my mother, then the police. They enforced the non-molestation order again by knocking on the jerk’s door and telling him to leave me alone. Apparently he said he understood and wouldn’t do it again. He said he’d leave me alone a long time ago and it wasn’t true, so. Victim Support called me and were kind. I spoke several times to a woman named Ginny who told me I was a victim of a crime, simple terms I hadn’t articulated to myself before. Am I safe? I went to work as if nothing had happened, keeping active, showing up for the life I’ve built and putting on a brave face.

When I’m woken up, even now, part of my body and brain go back to the night he broke in when I was six and I’ll be wide awake with the bone-deep, baked-in hyper-vigilance of a trauma survivor. I feel unsafe even when I am safe because I have been unsafe and that feeling never leaves you. The body keeps the score. On subconscious levels, it stays present in unexplainable ways.

Perhaps I’m with friends, or waiting for a bus. Maybe I’m driving or enjoying myself on a sunny day when a memory roars into my mind like a bullet train bearing bad news. My surroundings cease to exist. Sometimes these thoughts are a replay of an event, like watching a video tape of an episode of my life. Remember that time you were raped when you were three years old, my brain reminds me every day, at least once. (That perpetrator was a different person, not the man who broke in through my bedroom window). Sometimes the facts are repeated in my mind, just the words, an unwanted mental intrusion. Sometimes it is images of what happened that haunt me. Suddenly I see the rapist’s face, feel my fear as if it is happening right now, feel the physical sensation of scrambling backwards on the bed away from him then being held down and suddenly I can’t breathe even though I’m 38 and I’m safe, I’m safe, I’m safe now. 

On holiday in Japan with my partner recently, I was overrun with traumatic memories while we spent the loveliest day together. We were hiking in the Nikko region, just the two of us. It was April and there was snow on the ground. There were few other humans in the sparse landscape. Signs warned us in English to watch out for bears. A website advised us to “be bear aware” when we planned this part of the trip and we’d been jokingly repeating that phrase. I was freaked out by a map tacked to the fence beside a waterfall indicating bears were frequently seen nearby. 

In a public toilet on the trail, a sign showed pictures of bear poo so hikers could recognise the danger if we spotted it. My trauma doesn’t come with warnings like that, no helpful descriptions to indicate where a fear outbreak could occur. It attacks me out of nowhere when I least expect it. If you see a bear, another website said, curl up and play dead – much like taking the brace position in a plane crash or a solid stance in a doorway during an earthquake. Hold your body like this when the danger comes, advice tells us, get cosy and stay still before your possible death. 

The threat of bears unsettled me, but as we set out on our hike it was my childhood that felt like it was trying to kill me, invading the peaceful day. 

When that violent man’s car impacted ours, I’d been thrown from one side of the vehicle to the other, terrified, injured and powerless. The feeling of that moment remains in my throat. It is never far away. Even without a clear trigger, I thought of it against my will over and over like a torturous loop there in the Japanese woods, walking with a good man who helps me feel safe. I told him without going into detail that I wasn’t having a good day in my head, and he was kind. When things get real bad, I repeat simple facts: the date, my age, my location to help bring me back to the present: It is 2023 and I am safe, I told myself. 

We had a whole day of hiking to enjoy, so my mind had lots of mileage to torture me with. By the afternoon, after I talked myself out of the fear, I typed in to the Notes app on my phone:

Of course you are in pain

It is painful

Those things are wrong and pain is the correct response

Accept the pain

It is OK to be in pain

You are still good

What I must have meant in that moment is something I’ve been thinking about recently: I will never recover from being raped as a child. No form of therapy can make that feel better. It was wrong, and anger about that is normal and healthy. I can work to slowly manage the daily symptoms of anger and memory, but the anger can’t be cured. It is what I’m supposed to feel. 

I need to keep practising at all the things that help me feel better in small ways in daily life. It’s like a line I once saw on the wall of a gym: “It won’t get easier, but you’ll get stronger.” 

Usually I’m safe from traumatic thoughts when I’m cooking. Hands busy, creativity engaged as I tackle a complex recipe like vegan ramen, including stomping on the noodle dough, or attempting my first burnt basque cheesecake. 

Cooking is therapy, a hot bath is therapy, sex that I choose to have with someone I trust is therapy, tending my houseplants is therapy, cleaning my home is therapy, walking my dog is therapy, crafting of any kind – embroidery on felt, cross stitch and the knitting projects I’m midway through – is always therapy. Music is therapy, especially performed live, when I can lose myself. The grungier the better. Writing is therapy because it helps to discharge the thoughts that trouble me. Eating is always therapy. The comfort of the tang of natural wine is therapy, and so is a cup of tea and a biscuit. I could go for an English breakfast and a Krispie right about now.

Of course I meditate. Of course I write in a journal. I breathe deeply. I count to four as I inhale, hold for two, then exhale for four, hold for two, start to inhale again. 

I know all the tricks. I do all the things.

I have spent so many years of my life paying for psychotherapy to talk about someone else’s actions, to reclaim my story. It helped, but I still suffer. My ACC sensitive claim to cover support for being raped as a child was declined. I’ve tried support groups, somatic experiencing therapy and just recently I’ve started a very expensive course of healing-but-harrowing EMDR therapy that I’m paying for out of my own pocket.  So much of my money has gone towards talking about someone else’s crimes. It makes me feel like I’m paying for their mistakes – they did the bad thing, I’m the one suffering. It is unfair. Life is unfair, and I wonder if adopting more of an attitude that “life is shit so suck it up” could help, but that negativity is not in my nature. 

Having explored different kinds of therapy over the years, I’m coming to believe there’s nothing to actually do about it but lots of little things every day. Fill my day with simple pleasures. Crowd out the fears. 

It’s now 3.24am so I’ll make a cup of tea and watch an episode of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel to wind down. I only started the show recently, how did I miss the fact it was made by the Gilmore Girls people? It’s fast paced and funny, and I love anything set in New York. There are good things in the world. There is always another cup of tea, always another episode of a show, always another pat to give to a pet. If you’re lucky there will be a biscuit. I’m wide awake and I am safe. Wish me luck.