Keeping Your Journal Private Might Be Easier Than You Think

A friend left the following comment on my post, A New Kind of Journal:

I am interested in hearing where people who write their “whole truth” in journals actually PUT these journals? Do they lock them in a safety deposit box at the bank? Keep them in the glove compartment of their car? In the attic under an old mattress? Where??

Your Car
If you hide your no-holds-barred journal in you car, it probably would make sense to write in it in your car as well. Otherwise you’d have to go back and forth with it: Bring it inside the house or cafe or library (somewhere comfortable to write), write in it, then take it back out to your car. Back and forth. Too inconvenient. And all that coming and going could appear silly and surreptitious to anyone in the vicinity.

Pink tulips under our hedge

I don’t lock my glove compartment, though, so anyone with a key to my car (like my husband or my mechanic) could, if he were interested, read my most personal stuff. So, a car wouldn’t work for me.

A Safe Deposit Box
This would be better, but you’d have to go to the bank, get into the box, then sit writing in that bare little room where you’re supposed to be looking over your important documents, then put it back in the box and go home.

Fine, I guess—if you only want to write in your journal occasionally and can get to your bank during the hours it’s open. But, maybe you could pack it away in a home safe . . .

Under a Mattress in the Attic
That doesn’t seem secure, either. There’s always a chance someone’s going to prowl around it looking for an old, well, an old something they lost track of. In the process they think, “I’ll just move this old mattress out of the way . . . Hey what’s this? A diary! Well, why don’t I sprawl out on this same mattress and read it?”

I don’t remember any of the authors in Writers and Their Notebooks covering this issue . . . I guess they don’t worry that someone will peek inside their journals and steal an idea they’re working on. Now that I think of it, I don’t believe the question has ever come up in the journaling classes I lead, either.

How to Keep Your Journal Private
Actually, the solution to the problem of keeping nosey folks out of your journal might be way simpler than hiding it in a car, locking it in a bank, or secreting it in your attic.

Maroon and yellow tulips against the house

Kristin (no last name given) writes in her post, Keeping a Journal Private, that she feels her journal is secure because “I surround myself with people I trust implicitly.” So do I. My husband isn’t suspicious of my writing, so he doesn’t look in my journals, which are stored in open boxes in the attic and stacked in plain view on file cabinets in my office.

So that’s one method: keeping company with trustworthy people. Sneaks and snoops give me the willies in general, so I don’t give them free run of my house.

Kristin has a whole list of ways to keep your journal private, such as using code words or a kind of shorthand you create. Years ago, when I was single, I practically invented a language just for my journal.

But here’s what might be an even easier way to secure your journals: electronic journaling, which Kristin points out “enables you to secure entries with a password and ‘hide’ files” on your computer. Et voila-—your words are safe from snoops.

If you liked this post, please tweet it and share it on Facebook. And comment on your strategies for keeping your journals private.

Coming up: My next post will be about setting down your truths in your memoirs, which are intended for the public. Now, that’s a scary prospect.