Everyone knows diaries are crap.
Bridget Jones
Growing up LDS in the 80s, we were strongly encouraged to keep a journal, which I did faithfully every day until I was about 28 years old. At that point, I had filled so many boxes of my mundane writing that I finally decided to cut back to only writing 2-3 times a week. Eventually that has morphed into 2-3 times a year, only when something really important happens like brain surgery or an insurrection against the government.
Journaling can be a valuable exercise in self-examination, but in our legacy-focused Church, it is often cast as a way to link the generations by sharing our life experiences, particularly the spiritually transformative events and our feelings about them. That sounds great and all, but ultimately, there are two potential issues: 1) the more you write for an audience (rather than self), the more your writing becomes performative, and 2) will your descendents actually give a crap about what type of pie you ate and whether it was good?[1] Even if you avoid the mundane, is it really that great reading someone else’s feelings about things that were significant to them, but weren’t our experiences? Isn’t a Personal History a better, more readable format for sharing our lives with our descendents?
There is also something insidious about deliberately pruning the narrative of our lives into crisp little morality tales, fit for our grandchildren’s consumption (nevermind the fact that they may view reading our thoughts with the same enthusiasm they would muster for a plate of liver and onions). Lives should be messy. We are flawed people full of biases and bigotries, blind spots and bluster. The only thing worse than serving those things up as fodder for future generations is deliberately scrubbing away all the flotsam and human frailty to present an unrealistic, self-serving version of ourselves to them. When written as a way to promote family pride with a dishonest picture, the ends don’t really justify the means, not to me.
- Do you have journals? What do you intend to do with them when you die?
- Did you write honestly? Is what you wrote of value to others or just to yourself?
- Have you read the journals of your ancestors? What did you think?
Discuss.
[1] Blueberry, and it was.
Wheat & Tares 
Absolutely agree. Have heard that all GA’s are now discouraged from continuing the practice to avoid potentially embarrassing attitudes being reflected to future generations.
It is ironic, how we were pushed in the ’70-80’s to follow the prophet and write in our journals, the GA’s were literally simantaneously forbidden to write their own.
How many other things are we taught to do and the GA did the opposite?
We now know until the mid 1990″s the GA’s would go to restarants on sundays with general conference or be served fancy meals at the hotel utah. I understand why they did, but members.were told regarding the sabbath, no exceptions.
To this present day, we are told to pay tithing, but GA’s do not pay tithing (tax laws).
We are told to not go into debt and listen to the HG. However, when Ballard, self admitting did the opposite, and the church bailed him out.
In the mission, these exceptions to rules to both extremes of invention of ultra orthdox rules…to exceptions to white bible rules. This is the start of cognitive dissonance for many.
I could go on and on……why is there a 2 class system?
Recommendations on journal writting is a reflextion of their broken system….not based on the gospel of Jesus Christ.
As to journal writing and, really, almost any writing: If you can’t write honestly, don’t write. If you aren’t writing honestly, what sort of exercise are you engaged in?
Hawk girl raises a fantastic point. If journals are misused, they become a vehicle for narcissism.
The general authorities clearly stopped encouraging journal writing when they realized that doing so was feeding into the go of young writers. The coming generation already believed that they were the center of the universe, and telling them that their posterity wanted to know what cereal they ate for breakfast only fostered this belief.
Unfortunately, this aspect of journal writing has been taken over by YouTube and TikTok. Young folks think that others want to watch them playing their violent video games or balancing lemons on their heads. No one cares about these activities, and it does nothing to enhance the Spirit.
I’ll be honest, I’ve never heard this before:
“To this present day, we are told to pay tithing, but GA’s do not pay tithing (tax laws).”
Where is a cite for this? I’m curious.
I do keep a journal, mostly recording events and such with occasional feelings but when the time is right, I will chronicle the dissolution of my faith in the “Restored Gospel.” Weird to say but this crisis started when I realized Pres Monson was recycling his conference talks.
Yes, write! – but do so spontaneously & only when you feel like it. Ideally no one reads this stuff till you’re dead. LDS “life stories” are devoid of passion (as, frankly, are some of the lives) and horribly boring, but journals don’t have to be. If I feel like swearing or ranting&raving (Trump era) I do so. Frank appraisals of saintly & asshole relatives. I hope some of the writing is beautiful & memorable and an accurate reflection of life & times. Henry Miller & Anais Nin freed us all. Ideally before I die I’ll have the whole mess digitized & burn the paper.
As with everything, the answer is likely “it depends”. The idea of taking time for self reflection and writing down your thoughts is probably very good. The value you get from it is likely highly variable and some people are “better” at it than others. The idea of what a journal is is also pretty flexible. For family history or personal history, can anything really beat the yearly Christmas letter that so many people send out (not me, I’m a failure at this)? Yes, it is pruned. Yes, it usually only shows the highlights and tries to make the family look good. Nonetheless, it is awesome to see what your extended family and friends were up to for the last year. Especially when life separates us physically.
There are lots of reasons to keep a journal and there are lots of ways to keep a journal. Hwkgrrls stories on pie might seem mundane to her, but may not be to her posterity. When my wife and I were newlyweds, we visited briefly with my great-grandmother. This wonderful woman gave us several of her favorite cookbooks that she had used over her life. What a wonderful peek into her life! It was annotated with her comments in the margins throughout and gave a glimpse into how she actually lived.
So, keep a journal however you like. You may benefit from it. Your posterity may benefit from it. I really don’t see anything to get bent out of shape over. If you don’t like the way someone else keeps a journal, do it differently. If you only want the therapeutic value of writing your thoughts then burning them later, fine. Your eternal salvation probably doesn’t have too much to do with the quality or quantity of your journal. It is an opportunity for many people to get some positive value, though.
I do keep a journal and have since I was a teen, but it’s for me not anyone else. I’ve been typing my early journals and it’s been a hugely cathartic experience working their early experiences and relationships and seeing how they still affect me today. At some point I’ll turn it into a life history. I’d like to be cremated with my actual journals though. They are part of me.
Christmas, 2019, my daughter gifted me with a 1-year subscription to a company that would ask you a question each week. I would receive a question via e-mail on a variety of subjects, i.e., “tell us about where you were born”, tell about your best friends growing up, etc. You get the picture. I would answer the question and then send it in each week. At the end of the year, my daughter helped me add photos to the answers and then it was compiled into a book. I purchased two copies.
I enjoyed doing this, because it helped to compile things that I had wanted to gather into one place and I was SURE everyone would want to read. It was easy to do. I also wasn’t afraid to express my disappointment in certain areas of growing up and also of the church. I felt like I was fair and told the truth.
Now the realism. Although I think I’ve lived a fairly good life, it wasn’t that interesting to read. My daughter and also my best friend each enthusiastically read the book (I think). But my husband and son have yet to even read the darn thing. I showed it to another friend who skimmed through it and made a few snide remarks, i.e., “you needed to write about warts and all”.
My point to this story is that people are busy. And my exciting book turned out to be a flop. I enjoyed writing it, but it will now sit on a shelf and be used by whoever gives my biographical sketch at my funeral, lol.
At my sister-in-law’s funeral, my wife was asked to relate some of her memories with her sister during their early years. Her nieces and nephews were thrilled with the stories because they knew almost nothing of their mother’s early life and she hadn’t written it down. (Neither has my wife, but at least her memory is still intact.)
Anyway, that inspired me to let my children know more abut my life, so I have been posting personal history stuff on Google Docs for them to read. One installment was a mostly documentary history of my mission, based on journal entries, letters home (which my mom had saved), and letters to the mission president (most of which were returned to me when I went home.) I abridged all three sources and added explanatory and follow up material, but the vast majority of it (70+ pages in Word) is in my own words at the time. It makes for a weird document, jumping around from source to source, but I think it works. I did not delete any embarrassing stories (partly because I did not record them in the first place) and even added one that I thought was worth mentioning. The mundane stuff largely disappeared from my journal after the first couple of weeks in the LTM, so any mentions of what I had for dinner were relevant to a bigger story. And my middle son actually read it.
Other than my mission, the only journal writing I have done was when I got my first computer in the 80’s and thought it a new opportunity to get back on track. I wrote very little about what was happening on a day to day basis–mostly I told stories after I knew then ending. On two occasions, I told difficult stories for which I didn’t know the ending, but I wrote with a distinct sense of foreboding. They are painful to read now, knowing that the foreboding was fully realized. I find myself unable to post that material for my children to read. But it is useful for me to read and remember how I was thinking before big sh*t hit the fan.
I think it’s ironic that the Church discourages (forbids?) General Authorities to write personal journals. This is similar to guidance given to Federal Government officials, particularly in the Executive branch. Why? Because both are considered to be part of the public domain…the former by custom and the latter by law. And like the government, the Church is concerned about what is said behind closed doors. I’ll let the reader speculate why the government and the Church might not want us to know what is said privately. But I wouldn’t exactly call it a ,model of transparency either way.
Maybe Elder Ballard said it best: “we are as honest as we know how to be”.
My family has talents, but writing well isn’t one of them. I have journals from both my deceased parents and the writing isn’t particularly noteworthy. My dad farmed for much of his life, so his entries were like the weather and what crops had been planted, harvested, etc. But I still find that interesting and I enjoy reading them, because I know these were the things that were important to him. My mother’s is equally mundane, but also enjoyable. For instance, I really disliked my bridal bouquet, but my parents paid for it and I didn’t want to complain so I never said anything. After my mother’s death and my acquisition of her journals, I found out how disappointed she was with my bridal bouquet as well, but not wanting to upset me she didn’t say anything either. Somehow even after her death thid made my feel closer to her. It also showed me how much quiet service my parents performed over their lives. They were never the flashy members of the ward but they were definitely “high yield, low maintenance” saints.
My best “journals” were gifts from one of my sisters. In the early 2000’s me and my two sisters discovered email. We were all in the midst of raising our kids, working part-time and for one sister going back to school after five kids. We would send several emails weekly about our daily struggles, events, gripes, joys and just life in a very unfiltered way. My oldest sister printed each email we sent and combined them in a book as a Christmas gift each year. This is definitely the truest and most honest depiction of my life. This only lasted for about five years and we Marco Polo now so we’ll never have a memory again like that of what our life was like.
To answer the questions – I do have journals which I will leave for my family to do whatever they want with. If they burn them that’s fine, there really isn’t anything life shattering in them. I do always write honestly, but never anything that would hurt the feelings of another person. I try very hard not to hurt feelings now, so I don’t want to do it after death either. I enjoy reading the journals of my ancestors. I find it very grounding to realize that life is basically the same for everyone. We try our best and then we die.
I had the same thoughts as many about GA’s and their journals. But I do recall growing up in late 70’s early 80’s that it was really emphasized. I felt I was really sinning as I didn’t do much of any journal.
This does bring back memories of my mission. At the end of my mission I threw away my journal as I realized only after my mission that I used it mainly as my place to vent and it was much more negative than I felt about my mission.
I do wish I was better at keeping a “log” of some important things in my life, but now facebook does that for me 🙂
We can add journal writing to the list of things that GAs pushed hard enough to make us feel guilty for not doing them, and then quietly quit pushing at all.
I stopped being diligent about journals after college. Between marriage, kids, and a job, I was just too busy. I really want to destroy my old journals but they are in the garage for now.
But the journals are all I have. My mom worked and had 5 kids so there’s only a handful of pictures of my 80’s childhood.
I don’t do Facebook or Twitter or TikTok etc. But I do Instagram. It’s my journal but also doubles as a way for my mom to keep up with our lives since she lives several states away. I like it because it’s pictures with a caption which I think is much more interesting. And the hashtags will allow my kids to search for pictures of them in the future. Yes it’s mostly pictures of trips we take or adventures we have, with a little mix of tradition, cooking/baking (which I enjoy), and once in a while something more mundane or a musing on some current event. I try really hard to make it my story and not just being about my kids (because my kids haven’t necessarily consented to my Instagram and they will have their own story) but it’s a hard balance because it’s really more fun to post pictures of my kids experiencing life for the first time than pictures of me.
So while I will probably never read an ancestor’s journal, I’m hopeful posterity will use my hashtags to peruse our picture library and read the captions.
Interesting post. I remember being at BYU in the 80s and hearing a lot about keeping a journal. Many of my ward members did that, but I never did. I never saw what the big deal was, for one and for another, it always struck me as a kind of weird self-esteem boost/ego thing. As in, “hey, you’re really important as a person and you should write down your personal history” kind of thing. Far be it from me to judge the relative importance of other people, but I never thought of myself as anything special and certainly not as anyone who would want his posterity reading a “warts and all” version of my life. And it would never occur to me to put into writing most of my thoughts, which are convoluted, wacky and sometimes really unkind about certain people. Why on earth would you want to risk other people knowing that kind of stuff about you?
When I was a kid (like 6) my parents provided me with a journal and encouraged me to write in it. I got it into my head that I should only write good things in it, until I was 13 and freaking with some very traumatic things and just couldn’t deal with being performatively happy anymore. Since then it’s mostly been a place to work through my feelings- tellingly, I wrote almost daily as a teenager and hardly ever now in my 30s. If I were to keep a journal “for posterity” it would lose all its utility for me.
I had a great uncle who was a fastidious daily journal keeper. He left behind many, many volumes of personal entries that no one has the time or inclination to read. Someone is paying to store them. There may be interesting moments in there, but they are buried deep in the mundane. Those journals are perhaps more of a burden to his descendants than a blessing.
My grandmother, in the last few years of her life, wrote a personal history that was concise, contained all the highlights or her life, and was enjoyable to read (each of us grandkids were given a copy). However, I could tell it was written with the benefit of hindsight, with the stories possibly changed by time, or simply clouded memories; daily journals are more like a time capsule and less affected by such changes.
There is value in either approach, disadvantages too. I would recommend to do what works best for you. To me, daily journaling always seemed like a chore and never became a habit. Instead, I find value in going through the process of manually collecting and backing up all of our family photos to an external hard drive at least once a year, and getting to relive some of the memories captured therein. Occasionally, I will have them printed and bound for specific events, people, vacations, etc.
Also, I really enjoy reading old letters rather than old journal entries. When people write in private journals, they are either stuck inside their own heads or writing performatively to convince future generations of their supposed greatness. When people write letters, they are deliberately communicating with someone else, organizing thoughts and sharing ideas in a spirit of human connection. And there is something special and cathartic about the process of communicating through pen and paper that can’t be replicated by emails or texts. One of my most cherished family records is a typewritten letter of encouragement that my grandfather sent to my father when the latter was a young adult and at a very low point in his life, many years before I was born and about 2 years before he met my mom. I was never meant to see it, but it turned up as I was cleaning out my dad’s things after he passed away. Through that letter, I saw a loving tenderness in my grandfather that I wasn’t aware of when I knew him, and also another dimension of my dad’s own fears and insecurities that he never, ever spoke of. I doubt I would have been able to tease out any such value by studying journal entries, if the existed (neither kept a journal that I know of).
I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the early LDS data collection surveys to members found a high correlation between church activity and daily or regular journal keeping. So: Tell everyone to keep a journal and more people will stay active! Much the same correlation is responsible for the constant encouragement for every young man and many young women to serve missions.
I’ve kept a journal for most.of my life. I have made daily entries for many years. They are not. for.posterity. Very little of the content is uplifting or insightful. “I’mwriting.it.down to remember it now.”
My family has a long history of compiling and publishing family histories. I have some of the books. They are a collection of interesting stories of their lives, but not as encompassing as a journal would be. I think that is enough.
I am currently keeping a journal (multiple notebooks now) as part of therapy. I write a lot. They will be burned after I have come to the resolution of the reason of the therapy. No one needs to read what I have spilled into those pages. It wouldn’t be helpful to anyone.
Keeping a journal (vs a diary) is associated with therapeutic benefits and stress reduction. However, for most people, blogging and Facebook have taken up that space.
Interestingly enough, journals have gone from something the Family History Library wanted to something they don’t want (unless it is 70 or more years old).
https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/en/Family_History_Library_Donations
There is a large segment of the planner community that keep journals. The Bullet Journal community is large and growing. “Morning Pages” as recommended in he Artist’s Way are used to release creativity. There are, as cloves and SRM state, many people who use them as part of a therapeutic journey. Ira Progroff’s Intensive Journal has been used in numerous ways, including religious communities. But all these efforts I see as part of an individual’s journey. The thought that one is writing for posterity is IMHO both deadening and burdensome. When I hear someone say that they are keeping a journal for their children or grandchildren to read, I usually think that person would be doing their relatives a bigger favor by emptying the basement and throwing away old files.
Journals or not, we are seeing the most thoroughly documented generation ever. Emails, documents, pictures, social media, and websites. I wouldn’t be surprised if 90+ percent of everything ever written in the history of the world was written in the last 10 years.
Which says nothing about the quality of what is being written. The problem now is not finding documentation, but finding documentation that is worth preserving.
I don’t keep a journal, and never have, but I do see some value in it. I agree with Stephen above; there does seem to be agreement about therapeutic value, although I don’t really understand the difference between a diary and a journal. I feel a little dense on that point.
In a related note, I wish I had interviewed and recorded my grandparents before they passed., similar to interviews heard in Story Corps. There had fascinating stories that were worth preserving,
John charity spring, your comments aren’t bad. But why do you insist on peppering them with this “violent video games” and “crocs” nonsense. So much so, I mostly ignore your comments and scroll right past them. Sometimes you seem sincere, but I still can’t tell if you’re a troll with too much time on his hands. Let’s have a real discussion.
On journals, I never had the wherewithal to keep up on a journal. Even on my mission, where you’re supposed to be journaling such a non-mundane, oh so special experience, I wrote in my journal only a few times. Looking back I’m very glad I didn’t write so much in my mission journal. What was the point? That which I wrote I simply look back at and laugh. It isn’t something worth sharing with my kids let alone anyone else. Not my best writing, for sure.
My father was in South America in 1958-61. The church contacted him a few years ago. They Scaned his journal and gave us the copy and took the original.
We now have no legal right to his own journal. The church is taking many of these joournals to use for their own purposes at a future date.
Any one else aware of this?
When look on church web site….members can access some journals and others are not available to the general public.
Since many of us had multiple bad expereinces on the lds mission. It was NOT the best 2 years of life. Would be interesting to do study on the reality of emotional trauma caused by missions vs the faith promoting stories.
One day, we and everyone we love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what we say or do will ever matter.
JCS over the next couple of weeks you can watch some of the pethatic, lazy, young people you seem to despise, doing great things in the olympics. They have to train for years to be world class, none of your offensive caricatures.
My father wrote his history in his 80s so we had some help with his funeral. I plan to do the same.
Is it true the GA’s don’t pay tithing??????
Someone who knows more, correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought in the early days of the Church, people like Wilford Woodruff kept super detailed journals in part to compensate for less formal record keeping. So if, for example, he ordained Brother XYZ an elder on such-and-such date, he’d have a record of it even if Brother XYZ’s ward didn’t.
I agree with many previous commenters about the value of editing. I’ve kept a journal off and on (mostly off), and I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone, at least in its raw form. If I edited it down to a brief overview of my life, perhaps with a few selected quotes from my journal, it seems more likely to be of at least some interest. Of course, I probably don’t have the energy for that, but I don’t really mind if nobody ever reads it. When I’ve journaled most, I’ve done it for myself, often ranting to express myself in impossible situations where I had nobody else to talk to (e.g., my mission).
I love your thoughts on this, particularly your acknowledgement that performative writing isn’t beneficial for the writer or for any future readers. I’ve kept journals periodically all my life, and when I look back through them, the entries that are the most poignant to me are NOT those in which I have tried to “find the silver lining,” twist into something faith-promoting, or paint myself in a positive light. When I have spilled my true imperfect, vulnerable, often floundering self into them, I actually feel something when I revisit them. I’m trying to do the same on my blog.
I enjoy reading other people’s histories when they are real and alive with mistakes. I have no idea if anyone will be interested in my journals when I’m gone, but I guess it’s irrelevant. If anyone does read them in the future, I want them understand and appreciate the very-imperfect me. I write less for future readers and more because I’ve always felt a bit of a drive to and it helps me process my experiences and emotions.
The fact that he took his original journal from your father and his progeny is disgusting to me. Do you have any idea why they wanted to do this?