Rebekah, I SO agree with you, that journals can be a place to vent your angers. I also agree with Deanna that they are beneficial when you also put down all the good stuff, too.
As an adult, I think of my journals being like diaries when I was young. I try to balance what I say so it is "well rounded" when I look back at it or if it is read when I die. I don't keep journals regularly, however. I have started a few and they are in different places in my home. I have written during different stages of my life, so they will be like a "reader's digest" version of my life.
To fast forward to what might happen to our journals when we die, I can say that I am one who has already "inherited" journals from my father. I can remember him through his journals and I LOVE being able to think about him and enjoy things he wrote about his life. Some of the things I did not know, but I didn't learn any secrets, either. He wrote about his days (both good and bad), what he ate, who visited him and things he was thinking about during different perods of his life. He journaled my visits with him and when I took my children or husband, if we went out to dinner, where and what we had. He even wrote when my brother made plans with him, but didn't show, and how disappointed he was with my brother. He wrote about my other brother, too, and how he always made plans for my father and took care of small details in and for my father's life. He had weeks of eating habits written when he was trying to lose weight, various times in his life. He had congestive heart failure and had health problems during the last 10 years of his life. He would record days of feeling good and days which were not so good. The journals ae excellent records, informative and sometimes entertaining.
My father lived 87 years and he wrote journals his whole life. Unfortunately, all of his travels during his youth were destroyed, because he had a lot of great stories about his "hobo" days during the depression. I which I had THOSE!
Journals are pretty cool. They can reflect a person's sadness, loneliness, happiness, achievements and deepest thoughts and feelings. I don't read my father's journals very often anymore (they make me miss him too much), but I have them and my children can have them as well as any I have. They can enjoy them, ignore them or destroy them. Journals will mean something to people who really care about the person who kept the journals.
Trish
