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What should I do with my journals?

So many factors come into play when considering whether to save or destroy your personal journals. What’s your thinking?

As an off-and-on journaler since young adulthood, there are two main things that stop me from being consistent with my journaling: finding time, and wondering what on earth I should do with them after they are written.

The first challenge—time—is fairly easily addressable. I have tried gratitude journals or other short memory-keeping prompts that can be completed in just 10 to 15 minutes with great success. I also firmly believe that we make time for what matters to us—so if keeping a diary can make its way atop your priority list, chances are you can squeeze it into even the busiest schedule.

But that second question troubles me more.

The case for destroying my journals upon completion?

A personal journal has value, in my opinion, because it is a place where we can be our unfettered selves—free from the constraints of worrying about what other people will think, or worrying about the quality of that writing. A diary is a place to be vulnerable, even to work out problems through the very act of writing about them.

Are they something I envision other people reading? No.

At times I have formatted my journal as an ongoing correspondence with my deceased mom. It helps orient me, feel like I am speaking to someone rather than sending messages out into the ether, and imagine a compassionate soul receiving my words. Perhaps if she were still alive I could envision her actually reading them. But, well, I wouldn’t want anyone else to read them.

Which poses a dilemma if I ever want to use those diaries as a touchstone for future memoir writing, as so many life writers do (and as I often recommend!). Because if I hold onto them, someone else may find them. If I hold onto them, someone else will certainly discover them when I am gone.

Let me be clear: It’s not like I am writing anything awful in those journals. On the contrary, the types of things I share—the overwrought emotions and unprocessed (often reactionary) thoughts—are likely universal in many ways. But they’re not necessarily how I want to be remembered. It’s why at some point in my 30s I destroyed my diaries from my teen years (I am ashamed now to say how dreadfully embarrassed I felt upon rereading them as an adult—I hadn’t yet learned to be compassionate with my former selves). I am still not even sure if I am happy or regretful of that decision to get rid of those angsty handwritten pages.

In the introduction to A Writer’s Diary, the collected journals of Virginia Woolf, Woolf’s husband writes:

“At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood—irritation or misery, say—and of not writing one’s diary when one is feeling the opposite. The portrait is therefore from the start unbalanced…”

…a fairly adequate description of why I don’t intend my diaries to be read by anyone other than me.

When I ponder the question of whether to save or destroy my journals, though, I sometimes come to the conclusion that I should save them, but that I should write with an audience of my child or future descendants in mind. That’s certainly what some famous diarists have done. But, as Joan Didion wrote in the essay “On Keeping a Notebook”:

“…our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’ We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.”

Ah, so much fodder for thought, and yet I reach no conclusions—“to save or to destroy my journals” still exists as an unanswered question for me.

Where do you stand on this?

The case for saving our journals

Of the many reasons one might have for keeping a journal, here are a few that, in my opinion, merit their safekeeping:







Ultimately, the decision of what to do with your journals is up to you. There is no right or wrong answer, and the best option for you will depend on your individual circumstances and preferences. That said, I would absolutely love to hear what you think about this! Please share in the comments—I promise to reply and get a conversation going.

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