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Confessing your secret thoughts and feelings in a diary allows you to get to know yourself better.  And if you hold onto this diary even after you have filled its pages and you begin another volume, you will be keeping a record of your existence! 

Our experiences are precious; the infinite collection of them makes us who we are and who we become. Yet how easily we forget what we have gone though and those who impacted us in some deep way.  Our memories become thinner and more worn, until they sink from our consciousness. Then they are buried in the avalanching of new experiences. Aside from photos we may have taken that captured moments, we give no written testimony of what we are going through as we breathe!

Most likely no one is going to write our biographies. But you can become  in a way your own personal historian. I did at the age of 8 years old. And have continued to be so (for the most part) for 65 years.

When I was 8 years old, I got my first little diary from an uncle of mine one Sunday. It was white synthetic leather, with a little lock and key. At first, the promise of expressing little secrets in this filled me with joy. But then, that same Sunday I unlocked the diary and wrote my first entry: "Dear Diary, Uncle G gave me a fun spanking. It was horrible. I hate him. "

Six months after my first entry about him, I wrote exuberantly about the saddle shoes he and my aunt brought me for Christmas.  Apparently, I had forgiven him. Though I didn't say so, clearly he had never spanked me again. My diary was full of praise and love for my aunt.  I suppose she told him, it wasn't nice.

This I can remember only because of what I wrote in that diary.  Why is that important? From that point, I grasp the roots of my bond with this precious aunt of mine. My love for her grew and grew until her death at 94. 

So did my love of journaling. Though for many years I stopped keeping a diary, when I was hit by a middle age crises, I began again.  And I haven't stopped since. I am 73 years old now.