Because I was good little mormon girl with a knack for writing, I dutifully kept a daily journal from the time I was a young child until well into my 20's. I received so much praise because of it. My mother would tell me how proud of me God was, and what an incredible gift I would be giving my descendants. Beautiful leather journals were standard birthday and Christmas gifts for me. Even after I 100% knew the TSCC was not true and that I wanted nothing to do with it, I continued to journal out of habit. I even journaled my entire journey out of mormonism.

Then in my 20's, my perspective changed. As a young adult I moved a lot, as young adults do, and had boxed, moved, and unboxed those journals dozens of times. Every time I did, I would read through a few pages and invariably stop within minutes because I couldn't bear to relive all the pain contained within those pages. Over time, I came to see those journals as the physical embodiment of so. much. pain. Pain who's literal weight I physically carried with me through life.

So one day, I decided enough was enough, and I destroyed them. First I tried burning them, but that turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated. So I ripped out all the pages and put them through a shredder. Dozens of journals, thousands of pages, so. much. pain. Once I was done, I felt the most incredible sense of relief. With bits of paper in my hair and all over the floor, I was laughing out loud to myself and felt like I could fly to the moon and back. I also reveled in the sense of rebellion knowing the horror my mother would feel if she knew I had destroyed them.

I haven't kept a journal since. From time to time I get the urge to write about an experience, but I invariably destroy my writing either immediately or within a few days. To this day I feel a twist of repulsion in my belly whenever I pass by the journal display in a bookstore. I am by no means saying that journaling is wrong or bad. I'm only saying that for me it was a means of giving physical form to my pain and being weighed down by it. I feel so much freer and happier without it. I don't have any "descendants" and am not planning to, but if I do, I will give them the gift of not passing along my pain.

"Writers don't have setbacks. They gain material!"

caffiend Wrote:
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> "Writers don't have setbacks. They gain material!"
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Kinda zen

(Or Twain)

Apostles are apparently discouraged from keeping journals. Apparently that kind of forced busy work is just for the masses, not the elite.

https://old.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/295iyw/apostles_discouraged_from_keeping_journals_any/

So many of the old apostalic journals have proved problematic, including Wilford Woodruff’s account if the events surrounding MMM.

The church does not want records of its inner workings.

I think the whole journaling thing is another way for LDS Inc. to make money. My mother gave me two journals with my name engraved on the outside. I think both were purchased through the Mormon church, like the leather books of Mormon with your name engraved.

I'm not a writer and don't like writing in my journal. The Mormon church encourages it and it becomes another chore like reading your scriptures and saying morning/evening prayers. Just one more thing to do to be worthy.

I only wrote about 10 pages in my journal on my mission. I was so exhausted after of full day of tracting that the last thing I wanted to do was to write about it.

The last church calling I received before I left LDS Inc was to be the journal coordinator. I was supposed to encourage church members to write in their journals. Since I didn't write in mine I didn't see how I could encourage others to write in theirs. It was the first calling I turned down.

Like Journaler, I will one day destroy my journals. They are painful to read and I don't want anyone else to read them.

I am ever so grateful my mother wrote each day in a small 5 year diary. She passed away shortly after my birth and almost all I know of her is the small paragraph she wrote each day for 5 years.

The only time I kept a journal was during my mission. Roughly ten years after my mission I decided to transform my sloppy hand written journal into something readable (this was the late 1980s, so I had crude word processing software for my Commodore 64). I chose a good time to do that project, because I could still remember things well, but I had gained some perspective. I was still very TBM at the time, but I was very open and honest about what had been a very frustrating often disappointing experience.

I also have no descendants, so no children and grandchildren will ever read it. I did make a few copies of it at the time. I gave copies to my mom and to my two best friend from my mission. They were all impressed with my honesty, which was pleasantly surprising considering it was far from the typical “best two years of my life” narrative.

These days, I often go years without even taking a peek at it, but when I do, I’m still glad I did it.

I still have my pathetic mormon journals, but I keep them as my daughter decided to become TBM when she was 20 and she doesn't think I was ever very devout, so I think I should keep them for her to maybe read a little of when I'm dead.

I have some journals of the years after I found out my boyfriend/husband is gay and then when he left. I have journals of when my boyfriend came back into my life. Now I just keep cards my kids give me in them and I have cards my mother gave me (and she died 13 years ago).

I believe my kids (especially my daughter) needs to read what happened during the years after I found out her future dad is gay,why I married him, etc. What I felt after he left.

And then there are the dogs. The memories of our dogs. I also wrote journals for my kids from when they were born to age 8.

So there are some things in my journals that have some value, so I hang onto them. Now my yearbooks are gone.

I reread my mission journal 15 or 20 years after my mission, and had long since been out of LDS Inc. It was mediocre, and I dumpster it, along with my "scriptures". Now, 50+ years after my mission, I don't even remember the names of some of my companions. I suppose it would be nice to be able to look up some of those kinds of details, but honestly, not that big a deal. I didn't write journals from my time in the army, or teaching, or married, and my life goes on just fine without having journaled those events.

My parents, being good Mormons, sporadically kept journals their whole lives. Funny that mom, the über-Mormon, kept letting her's lapse. She was clearly doing it out of obligation. Dad, the convert, who, while devout, was never over-the-top about Mormonism, was pretty reliable in his journal keeping.

When they died, I ended up as the keeper of the journals. I went through and arranged them in order as best could. It is two banker's boxes worth, I estimate about 5,000 pages. I'm sure they go on at some length about me leaving Mormonism. I received several letters from them over the years that were doozies, so I have no desire to plow through the original source documents, so to speak.

I have no children. None of their grandchildren seem to have much interest, and none of them are active in LDS Inc., so I have no idea what to do with all that paper. I will probably shlep it around until I die, and then someone will throw it out.

If you've ever had to deal with a house full of stuff after the occupant dies, it is amazing how much stuff that was deemed too valuable to toss by the occupant, then gets tossed by the people who have to do the clear out the house. You should look at your own stuff from that point of view, and save them some work.

Ask yourself, how much stuff do I have for no other reason than I have enough room to keep it, so I do? An advantage of moving now and then is that you get to ask yourself is something even worth packing. Often the answer is "no".

I consider journaling to be a lot like genealogy. If you find enjoyment in doing either one, fine. Just don't do them as a Latter-day obligation. And especially don't be like some of my relatives who use genealogy and journals to show their superior righteousness and to try and make me feel deficient.

I really upset my mission president because I insisted on calling it my diary. Even then I objected to the attempted mind control although it was not until manay years later that I actually defind it as such!!

An older cousin gave me a 5-year journal when I turned 13.

I wrote when I met the girl who would become my lifelong best friend.

I wrote which teachers and which classes I liked most and hated most, and why.

I described the day my father died at home, and what it was like, watching the mortuary guys take his body away, and how guilty I felt for feeling nothing at the time, even though I had adored him. I was numb. And Mother had lectured me endlessly, "Don't you DARE cry! Daddy would be SO ashamed if you cried!"

And I wrote endlessly about how much I hated my mother. I eventually burned the diary. I didn't want my own kids to know I had such feelings about my mother.