4 ideas
In 1986 Evelyn Lau, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Chinese immigrant parents in Vancouver who pushed her hard academically and discouraged her writing, ran away from home. She kept a diary throughout, and it was published when she was eighteen.
A teenager who flees a controlling home does not gain freedom. She trades parental control for dependence on clients, drugs, social workers and institutional rules. Each new structure promises autonomy, such as money of her own or a bed without her parents, but brings its own form of domination. The sense of self-determination this produces is real but it traps her.
Bingeing and purging, drug use and selling sex can be read as a way for someone with almost no power over her own life to seize control of the one thing she has, her body. The destructive act gives her a predictable effect she chose herself. That is why it persists even when it clearly harms her.
Keeping a daily written record gives a person in chaos one continuous self that survives changing places, relationships and chemical states. By holding onto the identity of "writer" rather than "runaway" or "prostitute," the diarist keeps a future-oriented story in which her present suffering becomes material rather than her whole definition.