I tremendously admire people who regularly journal, and those who have journaled since they were young amaze me most of all. I love journaling, but I do not do it. At lest not often. I think a lot depends on how you want to use journaling, or why you feel the need to journal.

I, for one, write for pages when I journal. I’ve spend hours journaling, only to get weeks or months into one and rip it up for the trash. To me, journaling is being raw and real with deeply felt feelings. And when I think about being gone one day and my family reading them, I worry the words will alter their opinion of me, hurt their feelings, or realize they didn’t know me at all. Yeah, I’m talking that raw. The feelings we all feel when we know nobody else can hear our thoughts.

There are five cases in which I journaled and kept the words. They are in my hope chest and on my book shelf.

1) A daily journal limited to five lines per day that I kept in middle/high school for several years. I haven’t even read them since I wrote them, but they are stored in my old hope chest. I’m sure they are full of angst and childhood spin on the times.

2) A journal kept for each of my sons. The one for my oldest son was begun the summer before his senior year in high school. I wanted to record his last year through my eyes. When he went to college, I handed it to him through tears. It impacted him enough such that he journals still to this day. The journal kept for my youngest son, also for his senior year, I also did with a scrapbook to go along with it. His was a roller coaster year, and it contains the fun and the strife. He doesn’t journal, but he is a superb writer.

3) Two journals in this case . . . one for each of my grandsons, which I started when they were born and carried through to when they were one. I intend to give those to them when they turn eighteen.

4) The week of 9-1-1 I kept a journal of what happened and how it made me feel. That I kept, recognizing it’s importance to my offspring one day.

5) I gave myself and each of my sons a five-year journal one Christmas, in which you only pen four to five lines about the day. Two of us followed through.

Journaling is important. If you can do it without throwing it away, do so. Frankly, for Christmas I asked for another five-year journal. I believe there’s a reason we journal later in life. We recognize what matters, what is frivolous, and we don’t burn so many bridges in them. Maybe I’m ready to do another one.