I should be in school, but my back hurts for the third day in a row and – also – I missed my alarm clock and woke up at 10.59am.

I have had an epiphany, and I am just bursting to tell someone, and unfortunately for you my boyfriend is in the other room wearing sound-cancelling headphones.

I have been blogging on and off since I was fourteen years old. When I was younger, there was less self-censor, less over-thinking it, less “Can I share this corny song-lyric from the early 2000s with the world and call that an entry”. I wrote because I could, because I loved it, because I felt like my little writing-heart was just bursting with thoughts and feelings and messages that were worthy of being heard. Then I got older and more self-conscious and muchos afraid of hurting everybody’s feelings. I got infected by the disease.

I recently found an old diary of mine with torn pages and bent corners and drawings related to my entries. A couple of months ago I had coffee with a good friend of mine at a café where we discussed writing and diaries. My friend is an amazing writer. She is the type of writer who is always scribbling on a piece of paper, who feels that she HAS to write. It’s in her veins, and life is not worth living without it. She looks like an artist, not caring if that shirt was also worn yesterday, her hair always changing color, and she uses small pens and small notepads and probably sits in her windowsill at home when she writes with a cup of coffee and soft music playing in the background. Anyway, we talked about diaries and she told me she had been writing diaries for as long as she could remember. I told her in return that I was a horrible diarist, and that every entry I had ever written in a diary had started out with an apology directed at the diary for not writing in so long. That was how I remembered it and myself, as the eternal goody two-shoes who had always been held back by self-censorship and feelings of guilt.

Then I found my diary. Friends, let’s just say that self-censorship was not a disease this child suffered from. I can’t tell you how happy I was to discover that a) I was a little witch, and b) I wrote on a regular basis from the age of ten to the age of fourteen, documenting everything from my eating disorder to my one and only TV-appearance, of course dissing everybody who had anything to do with me on a regular basis. THANK GOD.

Why am I happy to discover that I was a bitch? It shows that I was and am capable of writing without being fucking terrified of offending. MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH IN LITTLE SOFIE’S SELF-PERCEPTION.

Now I am going to jump to something that seemingly has nothing to do with self-perception, so bare with me. You will get a cookie.

I am not a brilliant writer. I am not a gifted talent and English is not even my first language. I will try to be eloquent, because I have been told that I can be, but sometimes it will be quick and without strain and, ultimately, I am writing for me. I am writing because I know I have things to say where I cannot be the only person to feel this way, even if it feels like that sometimes. I believe that we are constantly growing and I want to be able to look back on this and both say, “Thank God I am not like that anymore” and “Thank God I was like that once”.

Just like I did with my diary.

So welcome to my diary.