Hi,

I am twenty-eight years old, engaged to be married, and I have a problem. From the time I was a freshman in high school until I was about twenty-two, I kept a journal that I wrote in almost every day. I have over twenty fat spiral-bound notebooks filled with my innermost thoughts from that time, all of which are now in a box in the back of the closet in my childhood bedroom at my parent’s house.

I was looking through them today, and jesus christ, I need to do something about them. Two of the books were filled completely with the sappiest, gloomiest whimperings of a young man who was just dumped by his first serious girlfriend. Those I don’t need to keep around and I disposed of them today. But the rest are a mixed bag. On one hand, I talk about day-to-day happenings that I wouldn’t remember if not for the journals, and I like that I have a window into my own young mind. But on the other hand, I wrote some pretty nasty things about my parents (who of course were ruining my life when I was a teenager) and about early romantic partners (which would hurt my fiancee to read, not because we pretend that we didn’t have other romantic partners before we met, but because there’s a difference between talking about past partners and reading pages and pages of intimate details written at the time you were actually with those partners.)

Basically, I don’t want anyone else reading this stuff, ever, but I’m reluctant to throw it away.

Now I don’t get a lot of alone time. My fiancee is out of town this week, but normally I don’t have time when I can privately go through this stuff. If my fiancee caught me reading them she would want to see them too, which I just don’t want. (And I don’t want to tell her no, you can’t see them. Better for me if she doesn’t know about them at all.)

I’m afraid of what would happen to these journals and who would read them if I suddenly died tomorrow. I’ve considered scanning them and destroying the physical copies, so that everything could fit on a small password-protected usb drive, but that would take far too much time. I also don’t like the idea of having them in such an easy-to-copy and distribute form. I could just get rid of them but then I’d lose that window into my past.

What would you do?

Topics: writing, family, privacy, private, personal, diary, journals