To hate my former self?

I read my teenage diaries not long ago and I have put them all in the recycling. Honestly, maybe I'd like to look at them when I was 80, but I genuinely don't want anyone who survives me to read them, least of all my DC! I was an absolute idiot. So pleased to no longer be a teenager and would not return to those years if you paid me!

Unless there’s more to this… you don’t write “terrible thoughts”. You fancied a boy and was self centred - very normal through teen years.

What perhaps isn’t healthy is to “hate” yourself after a reading your teen sorry from decades ago, and worry about how your adult dc would judge you if they read .

We all think we're Samuel Pepys at that age. The thoughts are normal, just most kids don't create a record of it. At least, they didn't back then. Nowadays there's social media but that's curated for public display, which may or may not make the content even worse to look back on.

People say not to chuck them but I'm so glad I destroyed mine. The ridiculous narcissistic teenage drama shite was bad, the stuff about the abusive and totally fucked up home was worse. Can absolutely see where my PND came from. Never wanted my children to see either. No benefit at all, quite the opposite.

YANBU, give yourself a break. What you describe is probably 99% of teenagers. They are basically overgrown toddlers with better vocabulary.

YWBU to read the diary, you should have thrown it out without reading it to avoid cringing to death.

But YAL (you are lucky) if you only cringe about your teenage years. I cringe thinking of what I was like five years ago, and I'm 40! Why did I do that? Say that? Wear that??

But toddlers think they’re being perfectly reasonable when they throw themselves on the ground screaming because you put the wrong shoe on first! They think this because their brains are still developing. So are teenagers’.

How do you feel about yourself now @LittleMissLateForWorkAgain ?

and do you truly think grieving adult dc would think badly of you if they found your teen diary after you’d passed?!

When I cringe or feel guilty or embarrassed about things I’ve done or said in the past, I try to remember that that’s a sign of personal growth. If I didn’t feel embarrassed or guilty it would show I hadn’t actually developed as a person. I hope you can reframe it in a more positive way.

Aw go easy on yourself! All teenagers are like that. Your moans sound normal and valid and your 'bad behaviour' is very mild. You were developing and learning how to be in the world.

I bet you were a lovely teenager. To the uneducated eye 😂. All teenagers are horrid and self centred and whiny op it's all right. You have a total empathy bypass at about 12 I reckon. I'm sure you're lovely now though. Enjoy not having to decide if you do everything through a filter of whether a boy will like you if you do it.

It’s astonishing when you see things as they used to be (and how you felt) through adult eyes. We really do gain so much wisdom as we age

Give yourself a break, OP! You were that weird thing - a teenager.

When I think of the awful way I behaved and the things I said to my parents at that age....

I cringe when I think about how I was sometimes at school. I look back and think I was a narcissist but I like the fact that our brains were still forming etc.

PPs are right too. Diaries are almost always the worst of ourselves because they are the thoughts we wouldn’t tend to share with others. If you wrote down all the thoughts you wouldn’t say out loud on any given day it would probably sound just as bad. You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.

I got access to my old psychiatric records from when I was a teenager a couple of years ago.
I was dreading reading them in part from embarrassment, remembering what I was like as a teenager.
They were nice though. My consultant clearly liked me a lot more than I thought she did!
I think I subconsciously treated her a bit like a mother figure which is embarrassing in itself. I remember yelling at her a lot, crying and getting in moods with her.
She was obviously very professional but there was a warmth in her notes that was completely absent in any of the other doctors’ notes.
She said some very nice things and I can see now that she really pushed to get me access to different treatments etc and advocated for me.
She included in her notes things about my personal style and the music and books I liked and had little notes on the sides of ideas for courses and things that I might be interested in (I had dropped out of school).
It actually changed the way I look back on that time because I now see it through the eyes of someone with compassion.
Looking back through your own eyes is nearly always going to be really harsh. Most people go on to develop emotional maturity and become less selfish etc. Looking back at your teenage self and thinking God I was so selfish and self absorbed! is a bit like looking at a photo of yourself as an infant and thinking God, I couldn’t even walk!

You were a child. Your diary was your safe space to vent. You were probably much nicer in real life.

Your mates will have been self absorbed teens too so nothing to worry about!

Could it be you had nicer thoughts but you used the diary more to vent? I used to use diaries that way. It’s not that I was acting on those thoughts but sometimes it’s better to have a moan to a diary than a person 😂 I’m sure I’d sound terrible if you read them.

There is a huge amount of learning that happens in your late teens/early twenties.

We met a group of young people recently on a night out- one was 18 and the other 3 were between 24 and 26- and the difference was massive. The 18 yo was clearly a child, making jokes about farts, throwing things around, squealing, starting arguments with strangers. The other 3 were not really much different to my husband and I (36 and 45). Most of us get through that phase eventually, it's when you're in your mid-forties and still acting like a teenager that you need to worry.