kahel atbp.

On Siblings

On Anaïs Nin, literary self-mythologizing, and why personal writing should always be slightly dishonest. (from my substack)

If you’re not lying in your diary, you’re just journaling, and journaling is for people who don’t know how to edit.

A diary is not a record of events; it is an act of creation. The best diarists know this instinctively. Anaïs Nin knew it better than anyone. Her diaries were not mere confessions but performances, half-lit mirrors where the truth shimmered, distorted but no less real.

Nin understood that life is not lived in a single register. Her diaries are a study in contradiction—one moment, she is in love; the next, repulsed. She is independent yet wholly consumed by those around her. But contradiction isn’t falsehood; it’s literature. She rewrote and edited her diaries, sculpting herself into the character she wanted to be. And is that really so dishonest?

People love to be outraged by the idea of a diary that is not entirely factual. But fact is not the same as truth. Diaries, at their best, are emotional truths, shaped by mood, by desire, by the need to impose a narrative on the chaos of daily life. Nin was not interested in being objective—she was interested in being immortal. She once wrote, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.” But why stop at tasting? Why not rewrite, reshape, embellish? If we can curate the lives we present to others, why should we not do the same for the versions of ourselves we leave behind?

Nin herself was a master of this. She edited her diaries before publication, removing, refining, turning herself into a protagonist. She blurred lines, shifted timelines, made herself more alluring. She called it shaping reality. Others call it lying. The truth, of course, is that all personal writing is selective. Even in confession, there is curation.

like the classic "to be loved you must be known" and I think for people who have trauma around not having been given the typical unconditional love from a parent or whoever it can be especially hard to not go through life trying to "earn" affection or loyalty and we can easily damage our relationships to ourself or other people by working hard to be "correct" instead of being authentic or honest and it can often even turn to manipulation - even if in our minds it was "I was trying to do what I thought you wanted" which SEEMS good but is actually another way of lying.