Sisters in secrets

No sooner than I blog about not being into the whole celeb thing when I come to realize that the late Anna Nicole and I happen to have, amazingly enough, one thing in common.

Steamy diaries.

Unlike kids today who post their thoughts about love and life for all to see on MySpace and Facebook, I grew up in an era when girls keep all their secrets in small, mostly pink, locked diaries.

Of course, anyone could have picked those locks — or just cut the strap, for goodness sake! — to read the contents, which made them about as private as today's online diaries. But that didn't stop me, and probably all the other adolescent girls of my generation, from rushing home from school every day to spill all, feverishly and furtively, about the day's forays into love, lust and loss.

While doing some spring cleaning recently, I stumbled on a handful from my teen years and sat down for an hour to look through them. Re-reading the entries after so many years was like time-traveling into the often confused but always curious mind of girl-to-woman Kat. Written in there, in girlish script, are the usual suspects: insecurities — "This morning the vulnerability, the doubt. Why? I'm not so sure but this morning I felt the strong desire to tell him I love him" — questions — "I sometimes am aware of people I know acting contrary to their personality to other people; I wonder if others see this in me?" — the oh-so meaningful quotations — "I don't want to change the world, but I don't want the world to change me," Eli Wiesel — and the absolute ho-hum girlie banalities — "El and I went shopping. Saw J there. At night, we saw a movie. It sucked." But then there was my essay on "what makes a good marriage" that surprised me in its rather sage grasp of the compromise and work it would take.

Reading a few entries made me want to go back in time, take that young Kat by the hand and say, "Honey, let me set you straight on a few things so I can save you a lot of heartache ..."

And then, of course, there's the rather explicit talk of sex — wanting it, liking it (or not) with different boyfriends — that bordered on erotica. The parts I can read, that is, as I guess at some point in my past I decided I needed to write as if I were writing on the top of a pinhead. Tiny. And that's if I can actually figure out just who the initials stand for — I wisely (or not) didn't identify my boyfriends by their names, so now, 20-something years later, I can't even remember who I'm talking about. This worries me!

No wonder why my adolescent friends and I made pacts to find and burn each other's diaries if anything happened to us. If our parents only knew! And I wonder what will happen, 30, 40, 50 years down the road when The Kid discovers my diaries in the bowels of the basement while cleaning out my crap when I'm dead and gone.

Will he get a better grasp of who and what his mother was about? Or will he be horrified to discover a side of me that he'd just rather not know? A situation that I imagine, one day, Anna Nicole's child, Dannielynn Hope, will have to face, too.

At some point I abandoned diaries, although when my marriage went bust a few years ago, I started writing again — now called journaling — to help me work through the staggering emotions. I don't have a desire to revisit that journal, though. That story is still very present in my mind.

So yes, like Anna, I have secrets that may end up one day in unsympathetic hands. Unlike Anna's however, no one is offering me six figures to read about them. And, unlike Anna's, there are, thankfully, very few spelling or grammatical errors. And, also thankfully, not quite the sadness that permeated her life.

If someone in the future discovers your diaries or journals, containing your most private thoughts, what would be the most surprising discovery?

And when you read the journaled thoughts of your adolescent mind, what surprises you?