Shame and Subversion: the Diary as Proof

Mijke Tonnon
07.03.2026

On a Sunday morning in autumn, I fish my old diary out of an old wooden chest. The glossy white cover immediately identifies the little book I used to hide in my desk drawer as a teenager. The theme is printed on the front: How Do I Survive Myself? Beneath it, a drawing of a teenage girl sitting cross-legged on her bed, writing. Halfway through the pages, a flat ribbon sticks out. The diary is sealed with a small silver-coloured padlock.

“For me, words set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of a given moment are as irreversible as time—are time itself.” - Annie Ernaux in Getting Lost

One glance at the diary takes me back to the days when I wandered the corridors of secondary school with skinned knees, a braces retainer, and a beanie perched on my head. Anxiously searching for who I was and where I belonged in the group, my diary often served as my confidante. That role makes the diary one of the most personal objects one can possess. It is meant to be kept safe: under the mattress, at the back of the wardrobe, or in a floor hatch. A diary is, after all, not merely a record of daily routines but also a guardian of secrets. The familiar padlock found on many diaries functions as a form of assurance.

‘Hoe overleef ik mezelf?’ author's diary during teenage years. Photo by the author, 2026.

I search the bottom of the chest for a key, but in vain—the diary remains closed. Perhaps that is for the best; I am not sure I am ready to be confronted with this younger version of myself, afraid of being dragged back into the insecurity and shame that marked that period. In fact, these feelings are not unfamiliar to the diary as a phenomenon. Already in the nineteenth century, diaries were primarily intended for teenage girls to record the discomforts that accompanied puberty. A neatly bound notebook with a padlock was already a popular gift for this audience. During the same period in France, the journal intime emerged: a confidential diary in which the writer’s feelings and thoughts were central, without a narrator or an addressed reader. This emphasis on the inner world made this form of diary writing particularly associated with women. 1

“For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises… These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.”- Audre Lorde in Poetry is not a Luxury

That this audience remained consistent well into the twentieth century is evident from my Instagram feed, which the next day is suddenly filled with pastel-coloured diaries from the 1990s. Various GirlTech TV adverts promote these notebooks as technical marvels, complete with secret access codes, voice recognition, invisible ink pens, and hidden compartments. The adverts are full of stereotypical elements: the untrustworthy mean girls, annoying younger brothers, and a girl gazing dreamily out of her bedroom window while drawing hearts around the name of a boy. This marketing strategy, the epitome of 90s girlhood, attempts to convey how young girls could take control of their own lives, yet it remains awkwardly trapped in old gender patterns.
My own diary, which I received for my birthday a decade later, fits into this tradition. It was merchandise from the popular How to Survive… book series by Francine Oomen, which tells the story of teenage girl Rosa van Dijk, navigating all the hurdles and obstacles of adolescence. The diary offered readers not only the opportunity to inhabit the perspective of the protagonist but also referenced the hidden, secret life that every teenage girl was expected to have. The padlock becomes synonymous with hiding tampons in your pocket, trying on your first bra at Hunkemöller, and secretly reading the sex column at the back of CosmoGIRL! The diary is proof of feminine shame.

“The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it.”- Susan Sontag in Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

What does this reveal about the function of the diary? Was it intended to provide women with a space for self-expression, or to keep them quiet, to avoid burdening others with their so-called ‘women’s problems’? Moreover, diaries were far from universally welcomed. At the boarding school of diary-writer Henriette Dessaulles, for example, diaries were banned because, like mirrors, they were associated with narcissism and self-love. 2 Also after marrying, patriarchy offered women little room to keep diaries: doing so was considered a sign of self-importance, and a woman was not supposed to have secrets from her husband. 3
Of course, men also kept diaries, but these were usually writers intending to publish their texts eventually. For women, it was different: once they sought visibility in the public sphere through publication, they breached a cultural norm that associated femininity with passivity and invisibility. 4 The feminine connotation of diary writing was thus linked exclusively to its supposed secrecy. This aligns with what gender theorist Judith Butler describes as gender as performance: gender and identity do not arise from a fixed essence but are shaped by repeated actions, behaviours, and societal expectations. 5 This phenomenon is painfully evident in the design of the notebooks. Padlocks and secret codes elevate the writing to something precious, yet simultaneously reduce it to something girlish and frivolous, destined to remain hidden beneath the mattress.
This assumed secrecy and inferiority also contributed to the diary’s long-standing exclusion from the literary scene. Only in recent decades have diaries by female writers been regularly published. A positive development, according to writer Adrienne Rich, who emphasises that diaries create connections and symbolise lives long silenced or hidden. In this sense, the diary embodies a distinctly female, and feminist, genre that plays a key role in revising and rewriting our history. 6 It is therefore not just proof of shame, discomfort, and silence, but also of subversion.

“This personal relationship to all things, which is condemned as subjective, limiting, I found to be the core of individuality, personality, and originality. The idea that subjectivity is an impasse is as false as the idea that objectivity leads to a larger form of life.” - Anaïs Nin in On Writing

Today, the diary—or rather, the journal—is inseparable from the public domain. With an oat cappuccino on a wobbly stool in the corner of a busy café, surrounded by carefully arranged AeroPress filters, journaling is the perfect activity to radiate your main character energy. 7 As an antidote to an endlessly racing, hectic society, the journal promises access to an alternative, orderly way of life: from performing female invisibility to performing intelligence, reflection, and cultural status. Where the diary once offered liberation from the rules and restrictions of the patriarchy, the journal now represents a similar attempt at autonomy: the fantasy of being the protagonist in a world of your own creation.
The diary forms a valuable trace of all the information, feelings, thoughts, and opinions that found no space within the patriarchy. Diary writing offers not only an escape into the inner world but also a way to develop, shape, and project the autonomous Self into the outside world. Precisely as a tangible, material artefact, the diary demonstrates the value of a female, often overlooked history—an alternative that diverges fundamentally from the dominant male perspective. As it turns out, in a society unaccustomed to it, women taking the lead can still seem awkward. But such main character energy is no longer a source of shame. If anything, it is long overdue.


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Mijke Tonnon, co-founder and editor of Platform Pudding, researches topics regarding (interior) architecture and domesticity, often through a gender or queer lens. She works as a freelance curator, and is an editor at Blauwdruk Publishers.
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This article was first published in printed issue of Platform Pudding #1, centered on the theme of proof and published in March 2026.

Notes

1. Valerie Raoul, “Women and Diaries: Gender and Genre,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 22, no. 3 (1989): 57-58,.
2. Raoul, “Women and Diaries,” 60.
3. Raoul, “Women and Diaries,” 58.
4. Raoul, “Women and Diaries,” 60.
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
6. 2006), 191, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203824979.
7. Cynthia Huff, “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, no. 3/4 (1989): 12,.
8. Main character energy is a popular term for a person who sees themselves as the main character in their own story. It originated as a positive mantra for taking care of yourself, prioritizing your own growth, and embracing your individuality, but it has also received criticism for encouraging self-centeredness or performative behavior. Main character energy describes the approach to everyday situations as if you are in a movie, and is often associated with activities like journaling, coffee shop rituals, mindful walks, and carefully curated aesthetic routines.