My wife keeps one of those five year diaries. The kind that you see for sale in all the bookstores around Christmas time. Each night before we go to sleep she diligently recordings the events of the day. Sometimes that might be where we went or who we saw that day, and other times it might be a record of something important that happened such as the election of a new president, the birth of a royal baby or who won a major sporting event.
PLEASE NOTE: Not a picture of my real wife, but you get the idea :-)
In her five year diaries she has page upon page of writing that covers each and every day of her life. It provides a wonderful record of where we were last year the previous year, or even five years ago.
Here’s the important thing.
My wife really doesn’t care who stumbles upon her 5-year diaries. She loves the idea that when we are long gone future generations will be able to get a glimpse of our life through these diaries. In other words she actively wants to share these words with whoever cares to read them.
This is not the case with most expressive writing and journaling.
There’s a huge difference between writing down a record of daily events and undertaking expressive writing or journaling about your innermost thoughts and desires.
When you are writing in your personal journal or doing an expressive or therapeutic writing exercise you need to be 100% sure that nobody else is going to read it … ever! Otherwise you will self-edit what you are writing just in case anyone should ever see it and that nullifies many of the benefits of this kind of writing.
There are four solutions to this problem, each with their own pros and cons.
Solution #1 Find a secret hiding place
If you really want to use a physical notebook or journal to do your writing in then you need to find a hiding place where you are certain your writing will remain safe from prying eyes. You need your own ingenuity when it comes to this, because the chances are that any simple solutions such as under your mattress or on top of a cupboard, will be the first place that anyone wanting to find your journal will look.
Even if nobody is actively hunting down your journal (hopefully that is the case) people could still stumble across it during the process of tidying up or making the bed and the temptation to take a peak might be just too much for them.
There are options such as inexpensive safes that you can store your journals in. If you do a search on Amazon for ‘journal safe’ there are specific options for journals or search for ‘secure safe’ to find some relatively inexpensive proper safe options.
Solution #2 Burn it or rip it up
This is a solution that some expressive writing and journaling experts advocate. If you value keeping hold of your previous writings, even if you never review them, then this is a complete non-starter, but there can be major benefits to this solution.
It is felt that by knowing you are going to burn or rip-up your writings immediately on finishing, that you will write with more honesty and get down on paper those things that you really need to process. This can be incredibly cathartic, and the process of burning or tearing-up your writing can be a wonderful release.
If you don’t have a problem with destroying your writing, or you see a benefit in it, then this is a great way to solve the problem of worrying about who might read whatever you write.
Solution #3 Password protected app or online journal
Keeping a journal on your phone or online via your laptop or computer can definitely have advantages. The chances of someone stumbling across it are far less, and even if they did they’d need to know the password to get in.
Many people prefer typing over writing by hand these days so this can be a win-win. You can have a safe place to store all your confidential writing without having the worry that your wife, husband, parent, children, room mate or friend will stumble across it.
The only downside about this is that your writing is stored in a format that anyone who has access to the data can view. That’s right, their could be a techie on the otherside of the world reading all your innermost thoughts and secrets. Scary thought huh!
However, the chances are that this mystery techie will actually have more interesting things to do that read some strangers writing so the chances are you probably don’t need to be overly concerned about it. Even if he or she can read your writing does it really matter as they’ll have a clue who you are? Only you can answer that question.
Solution #4 Use a fully-encrypted solution
If you want to write with complete confidence in the knowledge that nobody will ever be able to access your writing then this is the perfect solution, particularly if you prefer to write via a keyboard rather than in a physical notebook or journal.
Encryption means the words you write are not stored in a format that is readable. Special computer algorithms take what you have written and convert it into what looks, to the human eye, like complete nonsense text. Whenever you need to access this writing yourself a process known as decoding will use your password, and often other secret information, to translate this nonsense text back into its original format.
There are various different types of encryption such as Blowfish, AES, RC4, RC5, RC6, DES, Twofish. Don’t worry too much about the names. Just know that if you are using a tool that utilizes one of these encryption formats then you can rest assured that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to read what you have written.
For a very basic introduction checkout this page:
https://www.cloudflare.com/lea...
Unfortunately, there aren’t an abundance of encrypted journaling or writing tools online, but if you do a search on Google you will find the handful that are available.
Conclusion
Everyone is different so choose the solution that best meets your needs. If, like my wife, most of your writing is about what’s happened each day then the chances are you really don’t need to worry, but if, like me, you enjoy the many benefits that journaling and expressive writing brings then it is well worth figuring out the best solution for you.
Happy journaling and keep (your writing) safe.
