I Use My Journals for a Very Specific Reason. If Someone Found It, They Would Get the Wrong Idea.

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Each week, Prudence asks readers for their thoughts on the letters she’s received. Her reply will be available every Friday.

Heritage Hazard was disturbed by her Grandmother’s journals, which showed a life far more unhappy than the stories she’d been told, and worried that this revelation could hurt her family. As an avid journal writer, I use my journals as a safe place to record my anger, frustration, and sadness, and to work through depression that doesn’t define my overall good life.

This grandmother’s life may be far less miserable than her journals would lead one to believe. The fact that she wrote them in a language her family didn’t speak may indicate they were her way of safely venting frustrations.

That’s a good point. It kind of reminds me of the Death Sex and Money episode featuring a woman who found upsetting evidence of her boyfriend’s doubts about her in his ChatGPT history. It was hard to read, but she also explored the possibility that this was where he shared his most negative thoughts in an unfiltered way, and didn’t represent a full picture of how he felt about her. When you get access to someone’s private thoughts, you don’t get all the context because those thoughts weren’t meant for you to read in the first place.

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Re Heritage Hazard : I think you only supported one side of the coin here (that of not revealing the content of her Grandmother’s journals). Perhaps support for revealing the struggles and feelings of her grandmother could be important because it would give other family members the opportunity to understand Grandmother’s reality and that idealizing others’ lives is merely building a fantasy for the purpose of comforting themselves with what they desire reality to be.

The writer could let the family know that their grandmother’s “truth” was very different from the family’s assumptions and ask if they wished to know what was written from her perspective. If so, she could share the contents of her story; if not, then she would have fairly completed and honored all obligations to her grandmother, to her family, and to herself.

An idea that shaped my response —which, reading it now, I’m realizing I didn’t actually spell out—was my sense that the writer felt the information would be really upsetting to her family members.