I feel the need to burn old journals in which I bore my testimony or displayed Mormon thought patterns. Just in case after I am gone, I am quoted from it and others are led to believe that is how I really felt my whole life.

I can just see it. My sisters holding my funeral in a Mormon chapel, having got into my journals, and reading my testimony from 30 years ago as if it is current. Ugh, I must burn them first chance I get.

Any one else do this or feel this?

I recently shredded my mission journals after my sister finding out We no longer attend church, said how she would like to read them sometimes because I use to write her such uplifting letters. I actually remember writing in those journal and how I was constantly trying to feel the spirit and convince myself that the church was good and it was me with the problem.

It was very cathartic to shread those books. I would never want anyone to read those, ever.

Those journals you've kept tell the real story of your life. Like it or not, you were a member of the Mormon church and that experience has contributed to who you are today. If you don't trust your sisters to tell the truth about you, don't let them have your journals when you die. Leave them to someone you trust instead; perhaps your spouse or child. If you honestly don't trust anyone to tell your story, give orders in your will for them to be destroyed.

If you really feel you must destroy it, look through them and see whats worth saving. They might contain some good stories that you want to keep. If the journals are more bad than good, just copy the few good parts to a new journal and burn the rest. If they're more good than bad, just rip out the bad pages and burn those.

It seems a waste to destroy your own history.

I would never want anyone to read them. These journals weren't the real me. IT would be like someone who was on drugs or doing an experiment for the government saving their journals for all to examine and read. There is nothing good about them for me. I do have journals from Highschool and before and although I don't love those journals, they are the real me being discovered. My mission was just an experiment gone wrong. I don't ever want to have to worry that others may read them and try and interprete them. I have no regrets about it.

It's really up to you and I can relate to the sentiment, but those embarrassing journals help tell the tale of how you became who you are today. I understand the urge to remove any incriminating evidence of stupidity, but they will remain a cautionary tale to you and reviewing them will help you avoid dumb mistakes in the future.

Kept the pictures in my journal, tossed the journal. Took 35 years .

I have a BIL who was murdered before I had the chance to meet him.

He was shot in the back in SanFrancisco. He was the victim of gay bashing.

He had kept journals for a few years. I'm so glad he did. It's the only way I know him.

Through his journals I felt his anguish and confusion about his sexual orientation. Until then, I had no idea how people like him felt, thought, or dealt with their feelings and experiences. I was completely in the dark.

He opened my eyes in a way that few others could have. I wish I could have known him. I think we could have been great friends.

I'm actually considering writing a post Mormon journal. Luckily, my mission journals only discussed missionary stuff the first few pages, then the rest was a novel I was trying to write by hand.

My family put all my letters into a book, on the other hand, and while I find most of them in good nature, there are a bunch of them that bother me, especially when I display my closed mindedness to other people.

I already had doubts then, though I would have denied it at the time. I left just a few years later, while still at the Zoo. Reading the journal, I could see I hadn't been all that enthusiastic a mish.

I didn't feel any need to shred or burn anything. A trash bag was perfectly adequate. Did I destroy a bit of irreplaceable history? Yes. I'm OK with that. It was like resigning - it signaled that that phase of my life was really, truly dead and gone.

I read all my journals the year I turned 40. I was still a TBM at the time, albeit a pretty pissed off one. As others have experienced, I was surprised to find out how much I had mentally re-written the story of my early years, especially how/when I decided to stay in the church.

Ultimately, I threw away most of them. They felt like excess baggage that I had carried around since I was eight years old. I did keep a total of about 50 pages--enough to document some important events--but the rest of it didn't matter anymore. I'm really, really glad I did it.

Buy a scanner that attaches to your computer (USB). Use software that allows you to scan pages and then create a .pdf file of the pages. If you want to keep the journal.pdf secret then zip it into a file that is locked with a password. If a person does not know the password they cannot open the file to access the .pdf.

Once you have the scanner and the software (which will be included if you buy a new scanner) then it is quick and easy to do the above task. Then you should backup the .pdf file safely (that's another story). Then you can destroy the physical journal and nobody but you can ever access the journal that now resides in a password-protected .pdf file.

If you are 100% certain you will NEVER want to read the journal(s) again then there is no reason to preserve the information. But sometimes it is difficult to know what your thoughts will be 40 years on the future.

I'll be honest, I shredded my journals and yearbooks because it was too painful to remember the past. I had a hard life. That was 8 years ago, but I didn't leave the church til maybe 4 months ago? Anyway I don't regret it one bit and if I had to do it again, I would. I would toss my mission journals too but that's in storage and I am lazy to go get it out.

However, that's me. When I reminisce about the past, I am not happy and would rather forget about it. Maybe for you it's different but for me I have no regrets.

Thanks for all your suggestions. You have given me food for thought.

I was a prolific journal writer for many years and it will take me some time to go through all of them. Right now they are in storage and I would almost be relieved if I found that rats had made nests out of them.

But, when I get the chance I think I will reread them, save the good parts, maybe scan and save in a computer file, and make a bonfire out of the rest. I'm sure only about 10% of what's there will be worth keeping.

They are highly personal, stream-of-consciousness type ramblings that were not meant for anyone but, me. There are parts that I would never want kids or grandkids to read.

Recently a relative of mine, on my husband's non-Mormon side of the family, published a tell-all memoir. In today's word of reality shows, and talk shows, and interventions the things that she confessed to are not so uncommon. But, I found it a burden and deeply disturbing to be let in on her darkest secretes. I don't want to put my kids through half the crap I wrote in those journals.

Families are so messy. I can’t describe my father adequately without exhausting everyone’s patience including my own. He was awful and ferociously Mormon. He died in2007. Praise Cheezus! Open casket funeral in a Utah ward house, almost no one there. My TBM brother set up a table with things that showed who my father was—minus all the awful. One item on the table was my dad’s journal. I’m looking at the items and my name pops out off of the page of the journal. What is written is horribly mean and further evidence that my father was losing his mind in a hurry. Still—ouch.

I begged my brother to burn those awful journals. I wasn’t even the least favored kid. I can only imagine what he wrote about everyone else including my poor abused mother. My religious brother not only refused to destroy the books—probably 30 or so—he let me know he’d be reading all of them to try to understand our father. Yuck. I don’t even want to wade through my own TBM journals to understand me. I have about 20 that I haven’t been able to read or throw away. It’s great to hear others perspectives.

I don't really want to anymore. What do I have to be embarassed about? I discovered the truth and left on my own. It was a huge part of my life and I wouldn't be the same without it.

I'm keeping my old journals. Sometimes I want to puke when I read them. Truthfully, I think they are a fanstastic reminder of the screwed up indoctrination I had received. The self-loathing, constant anguish of soul, and idiotic magical thinking certainly help my anti-testimony.

My posterity will never understand who I am today and why/how I came to be this way unless they understand where I've been, fully and completely.

Journals can't be unburned. Just ask Sidney Rigdon.

Maybe you could pull out old untruths you used to parrot and explain why they may have been heartfelt but that now you are fully informed, you can explain why those views changed.

So of that, "When I was a child, I thought as a child" line of thinking.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2013 02:27PM by AmIDarkNow?.

I read my mission journals a few years ago at the 20 year mark and it was a bad experience. Not because I didn't enjoy my mission, I met lots of great members & non members & served with some great Elders that I loved like brothers but these people were barely mentioned.

It was painful to read my false attempts to pretend that day after day of miserable tracting was a blessing, or a great experience. It was a pain in the ass, I knew that when I was knocking those doors & I knew it when I was writing the suger coated, B.S. version each night in my journal.

We were actually told in the MTC to keep our journal entries upbeat and faith promoting, for future generations that may read them. The reality is that most missions are full of the same boring daily tasks, punctuated by (hopefully) the occasional baptism.

Ironically the missionaries that 'waste out' and spend 2 years, sightseeing and having fun with members & their companions, probably have the best journals for 're-reading later in life.

I decided that I would burn my journals after that last reading & I will definitely do It this year. I left a couple of years to see if I changed my mind.......but I haven't. I made a few mission scrapbooks of tickets/postcards/cards from members and investigators when I left areas etc & I have 4 photo albums from my 2 years, these are the memories of my mission that I can still look at and enjoy.......the journals mean nothing and are getting flamed :-)

I threw out my old journals a couple of years ago. Here's a sample of what they said:

"January 1, 1997 - Happy New Year! I made it a resolution to write in my journal more often..."

Next Entry:

"January 1, 1998 - Happy New Year! I know I said I was going to write in my journal more often last year - whoops! This year I totally will, I promise..."

Next Entry:

"January 1, 1999 - WHERE DID 1998 GO?!"

The only reason I ever felt the need to write in a journal was because they told me to at YW. There was nothing of substance in them - I was so terrified that my descendents would want to read them someday that I self-censored. I felt no qualms about tossing them.

What I have kept are the notebooks full of my short stories and ideas. Those provide much more insight into the type of person I was and what I was going through than any of my journals did.

However, my mother, in her brilliance, keeps calendars. For 30-something years, she has been filling in each tiny square on her wall calendar with what happened that day. It's not room for much, and a lot of them are pretty boring ("Went to work. Left at 12 to take kids to dentist. No cavities! Got pizza for dinner as a reward"). But my family uses these calendars to solve petty arguments ALL THE TIME. "Who did we go see that play with 15 years ago? Was it the Smiths?" "No, it was the Joneses!" "No, I'm sure it was the Smiths!" "GET THE CALENDAR!" It's amazing. Every New Years I tell myself I'm going to buy a calendar and start doing it... but of course I do not.

That's a fantastic idea! I'm going to consider doing that in addition to a journal.