Journals

I wrote in my journal today. It was kind of neglected. I realized that this blog is also kind of neglected. Still, I haven't written in my journal for about 3 years.

Have you noticed how a lot of blogs these days are becoming journals? I have a few friends who use their blogs as personal journals. I guess I can kind of understand but not fully.

I recently read through my journal. I actually have 2 but the one I read is the one I have been keeping as an adult the other was a class assignment in 3rd grade that I occasionally took time to write in until I was about 16. My adult journal starts about January of 2000 leaving about a 4 year gap in my personal recorded life history, who cares?

I wrote my journal expecting one day that nobody would ever care to read it. I did that because I was taught in my youth that journals should be kept for our posterity. Once I seriously considered this I realized it was retarded to think that anything personal to me would ever be as valuable to someone else as it is to me. So I wrote to myself and was able to open myself up to write pretty much as freely as I could. Honestly I still think that reading my journal for anyone else would be tedious and boring because of all the stuff that got left out.

Anyway, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that when I was single I wasted an awfully lot of time thinking about a couple of girls that I thought I would always be in love with. If either of them read this I am sure you know who you are and I hope this doesn't embarrass you. On second thought, if it does that would be weird. This should embarrass me and yet it doesn't. I guess it's because I grew up. In fact I would say the act of reading the journal helped me grow up just a little bit more.

One of the recurring themes from my journals is that I wanted to be a writer. I seriously thought at the time that I was a great writer. I know now that I wasn't very good at all. To be honest I am not sure that I am a good writer now. If you read the first entry in this blog you will see that I created this as a way to practice writing. The thing I left out is that I am writing this as though there were people who actually read this blog, though I know there are only a few. I write as though I have an audience.

In contrast to this there are many blogs out there that are publicly available that are written by someone as though they are writing to themselves. That seems odd to me. Doesn't it make more sense to keep really personal things on a pad of paper in your night stand next to your bed? I think it does.

I guess where I see the largest problem is in the potential pain and upset it may cause. For example: let's say you write something very personal on your blog, one of your friends reads it, then in conversation they comment on it in a casual manner or a dismissive manner later. It could hurt your feelings. The thing is that you placed that personal information out there for someone to read without thinking about whether or not it should be publicly available or if it should be just for you.

Okay, so maybe that scenario isn't too likely. Really it is just a point, though small, that I want to make. After all, this is my blog and I can make any point I want, valid or not, because I have comments on so you can disagree. That's fair.