![]() Pleez make me the happiest person ever and just say yes to me – pleez. Here’s a text from Josh transcribed in my diary on 16 March 2007 when I was 14: “Hey mia. As a result of my low self-esteem, I regularly manipulated even geekier boys into fancying me for an ego boost. Feeling ugly and wanting to be called beautiful was a desperate combination that made me do desperate things. I was a freaky, geeky kid with wonky wire-framed glasses and frizzy brown hair down to my boobs. Actually, I didn’t fancy Peter – in a move that sees me inexplicably brand myself “Lady Macbeth” in my diary – I told Peter I loved him on MSN so he would say he loved me back, and then I replied “oopsy whoopsy” and left the chat. Thirteen-year-old me somehow fancied Luke, Josh, Carl, Harry, Mark and Peter at the end of May 2006. The first four pages of my first diary contain six boys’ names. I am absolutely certain that if anyone had been around to measure it, I’d have been awarded the Guinness world record for number of boys fancied in a week. My diaries, I can say with confidence, most definitely won’t. There isn’t a teenage girl alive who doesn’t feel the pressure to be perfect, and I hate that movies and social media might add to that. To be young is to make unfixable mistakes. Yet in the book, although Margaret feels guilty for picking on Laura, there is no friendship and no dancing, and her apology goes unaccepted. At the end of the film, Margaret extends her friendship to Laura, inviting her to dance cinematically in the sun. In the story, 11-year-old Margaret Simon ostracises and insults Laura Danker, who hit puberty early. I laughed and cried throughout the film, but left troubled and disappointed by the ending. I realised the value of confronting this cruelty when I went to see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, based on the 1970 Judy Blume book. They reminded me that teenagers are uniquely cruel – not in the cartoonish way we see in teen romcoms, but in ways that are more insidious and mundane. Yet rereading my diaries cover to cover was far sadder than I anticipated. ![]() The instant messaging tool MSN is the best supporting character in my diaries I spent hours every evening chatting with friends, often directing boys to a quiz I created on the social network Bebo entitled, “Are you perfect for me?” They are a time capsule of millennial girlhood, littered with references to webcams, epilators, chain emails and running out of phone credit. ![]() When I first started flicking through my diaries after rediscovering them at my parents’ house, I thought sharing them with the world would be funny and nostalgic. ![]()
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