do you think people write journals in anticipation of someone reading them? sub conciously?

i think people are often too careful about what they write, and how they sound, how thier handwriting looks, and think too much about what they write before they write anything when they write in journals.

I kept a journal for years because when I sat and read what i was thinking, for some reason, I got a different perspective.  I have them under lock and key and have been wavering about destroying them. 

I used to keep a journal during much of my teen years. They've been in storage for the past decade, and will probably stay that way.

I kept my journal locked up.

I love keeping a journal....it lets me pour out my true expressions onto paper...or on the computer ( I have an online one as well).

I love keeping them from time to time! When I was 11 years old I began keeping a diary, so I could write down my memories of the day, and talk about it from a personal standpoint. :) I was inspired to keep a diary from reading a children's fiction book entitled "Mostly Michael." Unlike me, however, the title character of that book didn't like the idea of having a diary at first...but as time went on, he began to enjoy it very much.

So anyway, I kept diaries for about 4 years altogether. By age 15, I was becoming very detail-oriented and didn't have very much time every night to write out everything I did for one day. So my diary-writing kinda waned.

Since then, I have kept journals for short periods of time, and they've been about certain aspects of my life. And in 2003, I began typing them on the computer (in MS Word documents...I even went so far as to name one of them "heyyy, this is personal!.doc") and printing them out periodically.

How did I miss this thread.

I started a journal back in 1991? '92? on an old dinosaur of a word processor and kept it until 1999 (right before New Year's 2000).  It was kind of sketchy at first meaning, I would write in it one day and wouldn't touch it again for months. By the time I started dating Carlos, I was writing in it every day. It was really great for me. It was basically my therapy. Carlos kept asking me to read it but I told him no-I wasn't ready. For one thing, most of what I wrote was about him and I was not ready to let him know my REAL feelings for him (I was afraid I would scare him away). I remember one entry where I said something like, "Maybe I will let him read this in the year 2005". The reason why I remember that because in 2005, we took over the entire house and set up the old dinosaur and I decided at that point that I could let Carlos read it. When I reread that entry, I was so shocked that I called it way back in 1996? '97? I really should try to get it on something other than those ancient floppy disks because there may be a time when I won't be able to read it anymore if my old dinosaur dies and goes the way of the dodo.



Cat

I used to try to keep a journal, but I never really had interesting thigns to write about, so I just doodled in them LOL

  I've tried and tried to keep a consistent journal over the years with no success.  I have kept a sort of psudo-journal on this computer for a couple of years, banging out random thoughts, impressions, musings, rants on NotePad and saving them.  One of the entries became my first, and only, blog entry.  I must have had a hundred, or so, of these text files all over my hard drive.  I've deleted around half of them...

 

I do keep a journal. I've had it on and off since i was 12 or so. It's funny...whenever my life gets uneventful and boring i write on my journal like mad lol
Writing is like therapy once you write it down you can't escape it. I believe everyone who keeps a journal does think about someonelse reading it even if they don't say it.
You write because you can't keep it to yourself, because you need to share it and sometimes although we never admit it we wish that one day whoever reads it is blown away by who you truly are ;)

I used to try to keep a journal, but I never really had interesting thigns to write about, so I just doodled in them LOL


Same here (minus the doodling).

I've often pondered about starting a blog, but I know I wouldn't last long. There's just nothing to write (well, nothing worth reading anyway).

I've kept a journal but only about the bad things that happen in my life.  I don't know why maybe its a coping tool.
I kept a diary when I was a kid, and I have a journal online too. I just never use them.