For those of you who keep diaries (or journals)...

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...do you often find yourself restricting the things you write down? Perhaps you're anticipating your diary being read in the future by friends and family, or you just don't feel comfortable writing about some things?

I find myself doing this a lot. I tore out an entire page because I felt unconfortable having something written down there, because it just reminded me of unpleasant things (don't ask). Also, I can't help but envision a scenario of my friends and relatives in the future reading my journal after I'm dead, which is why I naturally feel inclined to censor myself.

I know this is entirely counter to the whole premise of keeping a diary, but I can't help but feel this way.

I don't keep one anymore, but when I did I definitely censored it. I had no privacy. If my foster parents weren't rooting through my things, my therapist was demanding to read it.

I actually want someone to find and read my diary after I'm dead, so I do censor it. Mostly I censor it by not talking badly about other people. This is because after my Grammy died, my mom read her diary and found that my Grammy had written terrible things about her and dad in it. It hurt their feelings very badly, especially considering the fact that they took care of her when she needed help the most. I never want to hurt people the way that my Grammy did.

Even when writing to no one, I still feel I'm writing to someone, and want to keep it relatively clean.

If I was writing a diary, I'd censor the things that I'd write in it. I don't want to hurt people either.

Mine is in a highly encrypted folder, I write whatever I want too.