‘Dear diary, he’s doing it again’: Charles Assisi on journaling in third-person

First-person seems most natural, but this can transform the view. Internal storms appear more distant. You see yourself more clearly, forgive more easily too.

Every night, just before sleep, he gets into bed. The house is quiet. The lights are dim. As his family sleeps, he opens Evernote, to write in his diary.

Is that who I think it is?: Triple Self-Portrait (1960) by Norman Rockwell.

The man is me. What follows is a story about how, after 12 years of maintaining a diary, I found that something had changed.

The habit started quietly, as so many life-altering things do. Not in a blaze of insight or a firm resolve, but during a season when nothing felt right. I didn’t know whom to talk to, or what to say if I did. So I started to write things down.

At first, the notes were simple facts of the everyday. What I ate. Whom I met. What irked me. Over time, I began to put down more of my day: feelings, conflicts, regrets. Revisiting these notes, it intrigued me to see how time had frozen on the page. In these pages, I found a mirror that didn’t flatter, but certainly reflected. And allowed me to reflect.

For years, I wrote the diary in the first-person. “I should’ve spoken up.” “I’m anxious about this project.” “I miss her.” It was a confessional booth where the only priest was me.

Then a friend, leadership coach Vivek Singh, suggested I write in the third-person instead. It would allow me look at myself more dispassionately, he said. I wasn’t sure, but I tried it anyway.

“He felt the anger rising. A part of the him asked him to stay put. But he lost his head and the plot. Why does he do that again and again?”

The line rewired everything for me. The diary turned from a monologue into a conversation. I could now observe myself as if I were a character in a novel, or a colleague I’d grown used to but never truly seen. From that distance, something curious happened: the storms inside started to look distant.

He, the man in the pages, wasn’t always noble. He ducked when he should’ve stepped forward. He laughed when it was time to tell the truth. He took comfort in indecision and called it caution. But he also made quiet decisions no one saw, stayed when it would have been easier to walk away, and protected things fragile and precious with a kind of stubborn tenderness.

As the voice changed, the tone of the notes did too. “Why didn’t he say yes to that opportunity? Why does he always wait for certainty?” It didn’t accuse. It didn’t absolve. It observed. It noticed. It nudged.

There were times I wanted to throw the diary across the room. Because it caught me. Revealed me. Saw me lie to myself. It recorded what I wasn’t ready to read. But curiously, it also seemed to forgive, and it helped me learn to forgive myself.

The voice in the diary is my voice, and yet it isn’t. It speaks to me like no one else ever could. The third-person allows me to see my multiple selves. I see a man who sometimes fails, yes, but is also persistent. A man always trying to be better.

Soon enough, the book began to serve as a source of advice, and not the friendly pat-on-the-back version either. This was hard-won counsel drawn from the bruises I rarely admit to off the page. The notes from the past serve as somewhat-dispassionate reminders: “He’s done this before. And he knows how it ends.” Or: “He handled that better than last time. Not bad!”

There’s a reason we trust old friends. They know the backstory. The third-person diary has become one such friend. The kind that shows up even when you’re sick of yourself. Knows when to call your bluff, and when to hold your hand.

Writing in the third-person has helped me name things I wasn’t ready to own. Regret. Hope. Longing. That secret pride I feel watching someone I love grow into themselves. The gnawing fear of becoming irrelevant. The pride and quiet joy of doing the right thing when no one’s watching.

I don’t know if this practice is for everyone. But I know this: I’m not the man I was when I began. That feels like reason enough to continue.

So yes. He still writes. Quietly. At night.

And every now and then, the diary writes back. Not with answers, but with better questions. If I’m right, those questions are shaping the man who turns out the lights and lies down a little lighter. They’re readying him for tomorrow.

(Charles Assisi is co-founder of Founding Fuel. He can be reached on assisi@foundingfuel.com)