Dagboek | Constantia Oomen

Digitized Diaries 1979-2022: A Reflection

February 3, 2023 – Constantia Oomen

After 54 days of hard work, I have successfully digitized all 350 of my diaries and got rid of over 100 kilograms of paper by donating them to the wheelie bin for the Friday trash pickup in Davis (hurray!). However, I kept the early childhood and high school diaries, and special diaries, such as poem diaries. Spanning from December 1, 2022 to January 23, 2023, on most of the days I worked for an average of six to eight hours a day, capturing images of each diary page, and any loose or semi-loose items that were in my diaries, with my iPhone14ProMax. The process was both challenging and cathartic as I alternated between reliving happy and painful memories while doing so.

I was able to rediscover my old self, who was both joyful and depressed (I was kind of surprised to discover this very happy side of me of the past), and saw my life flash before my eyes as I imagine people do on their deathbed or shortly afterwards. My diaries revealed the most frequent themes in my life, the majority of which revolved around relationships, romantic and consummated and unrequited. Despite the depth of content of the diaries (one diary literally weighing over one kilo by the way), my diaries provide great entertainment value, offering an overview of my life from this bird’s-eye perspective.

In a nutshell, my 350 diaries chronicled my as many ups as downs, my dreams and out-of-body and astral experiences, all my relationships, my reflections on the wickedness of people and the state of the earth and my marriage to Jeroen and my everlasting Rob Nanninga love story. Initially, I considered publishing all my diaries while omitting too private details (like full names), but I changed my mind when I started reading the content about my marriage. Roughly speaking, from 2000 the diaries become less suitable for publication because, and this is quite obvious, right?, the distance to past events is getting shorter and still can reveal secrets for some people. I don’t want to cause unnecessary waves: the purpose of this review of my diaries is always constructive, to see the value of meta-reflection as well as always having access to (personally) important information. I will publish childhood, high school, and diaries of my student days and working career until about the turn of the century, while omitting family names (I have to look into this). And of course I already tell the Rob Nanninga story in great detail online.

This is a first selection of my digitization journey, featuring standout items like drawings, intense diary entries, poems, photos, and postcards that literally fell out of my diaries. I will publish my diaries and parts thereof on my new WordPress domain constantiaoomendiaries.wordpress.com , stay tuned! I am immensely grateful to my former self for this invaluable gift of having a detailed and reliable access to my entire life, now fully digitized. Please swipe through and click on the image for the explanation or translation. This specific collection is not chronological, but most dates are provided.

Who was I then? Apparently, I was a Goddess of Love. And this time around, I’m not going to hide it.