Writing every day became part of my routine when I started taking notes, wanting to remember, wanting to improve myself. Perhaps it’s the consequence of a deep loneliness, of having no one to talk to.

Authors such as George Sand and Anaïs Nin are my greatest references when it comes to the personal, intimate, and companionable diary. I discovered the name George Sand while reading a biography of Frédéric Chopin; she was a woman who wrote under a male pen name. Later, when I discovered Neocities, I realized that many people maintain the concept of the “diary.”

When I was younger, I used to write in a diary, which was very embarrassing when my older brother found it. I found it humiliating and childish, and I stopped. So why do I continue anyway?

Maybe to mend a misery from the past. Maybe because I was fascinated by the writings of women who described their lives, their feelings, their environments, friends, portraits, and work in notebooks that, 100 or 200 years later, others would discover with the same astonishment. Because I was able to read and discover the lives of other people—their struggles, their loves, their searches—through their writings, and it moved me. Because one should not be ashamed of one’s thoughts.