Does keeping a journal have benefits?

It’s like a time capsule. You can instantly travel back to any moment in your life and recall what you may have otherwise forgotten.

I wish I’d have kept a journal of my high school years. It’d be great YA novel fodder.

But can one be truly honest?

The fear of it being found – at the wrong time – by the wrong person (an ex? e.g.)

The magical healing powers of writing a journal, sans sarcasm here, are unique and wonderful, however, I find fluther to be the same for me.

I have never believed in journals or diaries, unless there is a suitable need for them. This personal information can either help or hurt you.

In the wrong hands could prove costly to the writer.

Writing would be out and my memory banks would be in.

I write a daily journal entry. The last time I missed a day was in September of 2007. Sometimes they’re pages-long emotional dumps. Sometimes they’re more along the lines of “I had a good sandwich for lunch.” But I always write something. It’s come in extremely handy a few times when dealing with doctors and various government agencies who want to know exact dates for silly crap that nobody would ever remember the dates for unless they’d happened to write them down somewhere.

Writing about your feelings can bring clarity.

Reading about it later can bring alive your feelings about a past time.

It can be helpful to some people. I had one when I was eighteen, which I kept for about a year and a half, and I found it very helpful to getting things out of my head so I didn’t dwell on them. It’s good to actually reflect on what you think as well.

My mother always told me never to put things on paper that can destroy lives. I did it anyway. These days, I rarely write in a journal, life’s moving too fast, I guess. I will write a book about it though.

I’ve kept a journal since I was 11. At some periods in my life I’ve been a more active journaler than at others. It has been delightful reading back through old entries. I actively wrote about my children’s younger years. I would have forgotten about so much of that stuff if I hadn’t written about it. I can see how much I’ve changed through the years.

Are there things in those books that I probably wouldn’t want broadcast? Maybe, but those entries are truly me: my hopes, my dreams, my fears and my opinions.

I don’t like talking to myself and I don’t like listening to myself. It’s probably not a surprise that my few attempts at journaling ended up fighting the dust bunnies for shelf space in short order.

I made a few attempts in high school and college. I thought I ought to. But I hated writing by hand. My hands would start being very painful after a few paragraphs. I also had difficulties finding time to do it. I liked to devote all my free time to science fiction or television or something like that.

But mostly, I can’t write if I don’t know who I am writing to. I guess a lot of people can write to themselves, but I can’t Other people might be interested in reading what I have to say, but I don’t. I never go back and read anything I wrote. I never edit. I quickly forget what I wrote. Which means all the questions are fresh to me most of the time.

I like to answer questions because they take me on a path of discovery when I answer. I can write to a real person when I answer. Someone who will probably read it, because they are interested in the answer. Writing to myself would be an utter waste of time. It would be torture. I would hate the way I wrote about things, even if I was interested in what I wrote about.

I have kept every single letter I wrote since I 18, and if I could tolerate it, maybe those would be a journal. But most of my letters are beyond embarrassing. I used to think I was saving them for someone after I died, if they became interested in my life. That was back when I thought I’d do something interesting. But now that I think about it, it’s probably time to go back and burn everything, and create space for new things. It is usually acutely embarrassing to read that crap—like when your mother shows your new girlfriend pictures of you as a one year old, smearing your own shit on the walls.

There are no pictures that I know of, but my Mother tells me I did that. What’s worse, she tells other people.

Are you happy now, @seazen_ ?

I have kept journals throughout the years since high school. I could never keep up with it daily. If there was something exciting going on in my life or painful things that needed working through, I was inspired to write. Otherwise it always fell by the wayside. Whatever I did write I have kept. Yes, I sometimes worry about someone reading it and being embarrassed about certain things I wrote. I also have some letters I wrote to people and did not send because I felt they were too revealing or not well written. Strangely I have kept them. These letters are like a snapshot of my life at the time I wrote them. I find that reading them helps to correct some of the thought distortions that occur as time goes by. I think we’re all pretty good at rewriting our own histories. We do it and sometimes, usually, we’re not even aware that we do it. Reading our own “first person” accounts of our lives can give us a reality adjustment. And sometimes it has shown me how far I have come in my personal development.

@Talimze You also had that cool one I saw in your AB page. Or were you talking about that one?

@Symbeline Oh yes, one and the same.
That’s another thing about online journals, there are very good if you want people to realize how awesome you are. This is especially important if you’re extraordinarily insecure, like me.

So you still have it?

Well, it still exists on the internet, but I haven’t added anything to it in about a year.

@wundayatta In a word: Yes.

I liked my few attempts at journaling ended up fighting the dust bunnies for shelf space in short order.

Well, I started keeping one again and recording every little thought, emotion, and detail I can thanks to this thread.

Fiddle Playing Creole Bastard That’s great that you are doing it again.I’m sure you have a lot to say. Random thoughts can become something more than random, especially in a poet’s hands…..
I just went to a great exhibit of diaries at the Pierpont Morgan Library in NY.

I want to share a quote from the diary of E.B. White dated 1948 concerning his journals:
“Where I would like to discover facts, I find fancy. Where I would like to know what I did, I learn only what I was thinking. Occasionally they manage to report something in exquisite honesty and accuracy.”

By the following year he had resolved many of his doubts and had come to a place where he was satisfied with his writing and that just deepened into further assurance as time went by. What a nice place to progress to in a year’s time! We should all be so lucky!

Wundayatta I hope you would never burn those diaries and letters. But it is a problem just what to do with them, I agree. As far as feeling that you are writing to yourself, well, to me you are writing it because, just as in telling someone a dream, you may not know what the dream means at first, but as you are forced to put it into words you may have an insight. You may choose a metaphor to express something and that explains your visual iconography in the dream. It allows your sub-conscious to be at least partially revealed to your self. You may in fact be writing to yourself, to your future self. You become your own voice from the past. Who would know more truly and deeply what you felt? And as I say, there is so much you forget over time. It’s scary how much I have forgotten. Not all of it is the bad things which it would be understandable to forget. I also have forgotten about good things, old friendships and what they meant to me, people I lost track of along the way. Maybe it’s all very self indulgent. There are probably many more reason to keep a journal. I’d love to keep this thread going! I want to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.

And now I am perplexed with your statement “I have kept every single letter I wrote since I was 18…” Did you not send any of these letters? Or did you make copies? I have some that I neglected to send, but there are many more I wrote that I have no record of.

@Earthgirl I made copies of the letters. They were all sent out.

Writing to my future self sounds all well and good, but the problem is I don’t know who my future self is, so I don’t know what I want to say to him. Worse, he can’t write back, so I get no feedback.

I need feedback. I need to know if I’m being understood. I need to know what people think of what I’ve said. Do they agree? Disagree? Want to add to it? Did they learn anything from what I said?

Actually, it’s quite mysterious to me how people can keep journals. They must have some audience in mind, or else how could they write? Perhaps their audience is themselves. Although that bothers me. Why would you write to tell yourself things you already know?

I guess I have an answer to that. I suppose you write to see what you think. A lot of times that’s why I write on fluther. I use someone’s question as a starting point to see what I think on that particular subject. Still, I don’t know if that would work to motivate me to keep a journal. Somehow, I can write when there’s a question, but not otherwise. I don’t think I could manufacture questions for myself.

It’s a conundrum.

Wundayatta. I guess on some level its cathartic. It gets everything out of your head and onto paper so it breaks that circular thought process of constantly rehashing things. Maybe its only me, I tend to obsess a little too much.

@Earthgirl So you’re venting? Like to the universal listener? The perfect listener?

I guess it must work if you keep on doing it. The only thing that brings me catharsis is resolving my problem with whoever or whatever is giving me angst positively, or finding someone who loves me no matter what to say it’s ok. But those solutions tend to be unavailable to me.

Wundayatta I wouldn’t claim that it’s working so well just because I keep on doing it, lol. I’ve been known to bang my head against walls at times, metaphorically speaking. I don’t think I write about things that need resolution so much as things that I am confused about, or find hard to accept, or am angry about and don’t feel free to express openly. Also secrets…all good stuff to divulge to that univeral listener whereof you speak…..