do diaries help you relax and let somone know about your feelings without telling anoyone..should i start one? because my life isn't perfect it kinda sucks acutally i know some people have worse but will a diary help me????

templelane

This goes against the general consensus but I actually found a diary was counter productive. It made me dwell on bad situations. So if you write down bad angry things I suggest you burn them afterwards and only keep the good thoughts in your diary.

I always preferred scrapbooks of good times - tickets form events, photos of friends, things I found which made me laugh, cool artwork. It is easy to flick through for a visual 'up.' Also I can't get embarrassed by my terrible spelling and melodramatic writing style. I have to tone it down so much on this site. Woe is me.

Clough

In my opinion and experience, I think that keeping and maintaining a diary can be a very beneficial thing to a person.

I'm going to apologize about my post ahead of time. If you take the time to read what I have to say, God Bless You! If you choose not to, then that is okay too! God Bless You, also! I just got myself on a kick about the original question. As you can see, I am writing down my thoughts and it is helping me, because I think that this is an important topic to be discussed. And hopefully, depressedhelp will see how my doing something like I am doing right now might be of benefit to her if she were to do the same thing on a daily basis. When I was her age, I couldn't even write a simple letter to someone without taking forever at doing it. Most of the time, I didn't bother to do it because it was so hard for me. Even when I did accomplish writing something of a note, I still didn't think that I had written enough and it was very hard for me to write anything else. But, with practice, I am now able to write what I think with relative ease.

I am trying to address depressedhelp's question, but at the same time, in my opinion, writing things down is something that deserves and warrants a deeper study. I do think that putting things in writing can be very beneficial to the person who chooses to do that. I could see where it could also be a bane to a person who writes things down, if writing their thoughts down causes them to become more angry about some things. Maybe, they are the type of person who just needs to walk away from a situation and try to forget it and work things out by doing some other activity to try and work things through for themselves.

Each to their own concerning writing things down. It depends on you as a person as to whether it will help you to put things in writing about the things that concern you, good or bad. I think that there is a little of the "born writer" in all of us. Some of us just aren't very good at writing yet because we have not practiced doing such a thing. So, we may be a "born talker" or "born to keep our thoughts to ourselves, but wish that someone would be able to read and care about our thoughts" in the meantime. All of us, deep down inside, have a story to tell that we would like others to share in with us. We want people to listen to us, to like or love us as persons. Reaching out in some way, be it in writing or verbally, I would think is a basic human need that we all have. "No man is an island."

I find that when I write things down about the concerns and joys in my life that I am thinking about, that I can then go to sleep at night realizing that I have done the best that I can for that day; am much more able to put my thoughts to rest and not have to dwell on those things after having written them down, since I am a very obsessive/compulsive type of person, And, can then get a good night's sleep because I know that what I have written down will still be there for my review later if I wish to review it, and I don't have to worry about forgetting about those things because I have put them in writing.

Scrap-booking is good! It does take a lot of organizing to keep up with such a thing as that. But, with practice, you just get into a routine and make it a habit.

Someday, your children may want to know about the things in your life - the good or the bad. You may not be able to remember everything about your life so that you will be able to tell them. Writing things down in a journal or diary can be a big help to your children in the future. Writing things down is not something that you just do for yourself, it is something that you do for the benefit of others, if we look at the far-reaching effects of doing such a thing.

One of the things that I do for a living is that I am a professional musician. I travel around the upper Midwest in the U.S. playing gigs in all sorts of places with other professional musicians like myself. The stories of things that have happened in these other people's lives is just incredible! When we are riding on a band bus together, sometimes people will just start sharing things about what they believe concerning life or the concerns in their lives, that usually have nothing to do with music.

Frequently, I will be asking questions about another person's early history as to how they came about doing this or that. After they have finished their usually very interesting story, I will ask them, "Have you told your children about this?" The usual answer is "No." I then encourage them to write these things down so that their children can know about these things and so these stories can hopefully then be passed down from generation to generation as part of the family history.

You never know when something that you have written down will be a help to others as well as being a help to yourself.

Okay, that's enough Clough! I hope that I didn't bore anyone here who bothered to read this. Just my thoughts and opinions. I hope that they were helpful.

startover22

I was not bored at all and I wish you would come the the West Coast to play. I would love to get to see you perform! Also, thanks, because I thought I wasn't a writter also, it just started to come out and boy did that feel good. I learned things by looking at what I was writing down. I learned who I was and from there, i have begun to twist a few things so I could be a better person. Thanks again Clough! Hmmmmm, you got soul baby! Everyone does, we just need to let it out. Through your music, through our writing, anything!