For most of my life, a viscous fog of confusion clouded my identity. I had never grasped the importance of seeing and understanding your personal identity until I realized I lacked one. I was born in Chile, but I’ve lived in Guatemala, Colombia, Texas, and Brazil. I went to eight different schools. I made friends and then lost them every two years or so. With my parents I speak Spanish, yet with my brothers I speak English. It’s not difficult to understand why I didn’t know who I was. Every twenty months, my environment changed drastically.

When we finally settled down in Miami, I was lost the labyrinth of different cultures, languages, and social norms. I was always asked, “Where are you from?” How was I supposed to answer that? Though I was born in Chile, I surely could not affirm that I was “from” there, because “from”, to me, implies a connection with that country that runs deeper than merely being born there. That was my case with Chile, I moved elsewhere when I was 2 years old and never went back to visit. To this day I have no memory of my birthplace. Could I say I was from Colombia although I wasn’t born there? Both of my parents were, my entire extended family is from there, and I adopted many cultural aspects from Colombia. I have an American passport, does that count as being “from” there?

I am fairly certain that no other ten-year-old has debated what the word “from” means as much as I did. I was unable to answer this mundane, simple question—a common conversation starter.

So I began to write—no prompts, no limits, just the flow of my thoughts. Eventually, I found my answer: clearly I was from Mars because I was the only kid who read Eragon in the fourth grade (yes, it is about dragons hatching from magical stones, and yes, it is over 500 pages long).

I’m forever grateful to my younger self for writing journals. Although every time I open my diary from 2007 I cringe at my spelling and grammar, reading the drama my seven-year-old self so effusively wrote about never fails to make me laugh. Regardless of the frequent hyperbole and ridiculous syntactical errors, my diaries show me an image of who I was much more accurately than my memory ever could.

Oscar Wilde once said, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” Diaries are fascinating. If you think about yourself in the past, what do you remember? You might think of the mistakes you have made, or the different hairstyles you had, or a huge accomplishment you attained. But can you recall how you thought differently than your present self?

Though diaries may seem trivial, they are remarkable. Diaries are a sort of personal history that is incomparable to any memory, to any biography, or any introspection. Diaries push people to find themselves, to process their day, or to remember the past more vividly. Diaries exude the beauty of the different dimensions of time, and how change and growth are relentless and magnanimous.