As a life-long diarist, I have several reasons why I write out my thoughts and feelings and keep them.
I do it to remember. There are things I want to keep, to canonize, to note in as much detail as possible. Romances, adventures, achievements - I want to hold them as long as I can, expecting joys to fly away as easily as they come. And they have. I was right to write about that surprise kiss in the freezing wooded night, that heart-jolting long look across the table, the utter magic of her laugh, the dopamine hit when I smelled him. My memories are my greatest treasures.
I do it to not forget. As I've learned over my lifetime, the memory is an unreliable narrator. After reviewing letters, datebooks, journals, blog posts, photos, and other physical evidence, I have repeatedly discovered that the story I had been believing was not accurate. Sometimes the parts are right but out of order. We had only been friends for a year (not three) when she betrayed me. We did get a room above a bar, but it wasn't Zeitgeist, it was Albion. Yes, we met at a lake in Novato, but it was at the rave in May, not the wedding in August. Sometimes I've assigned deeds to the wrong person, wrong place, wrong time... and oh wait, that didn't happen, that was a dream I had. I think it's important to keep an account of one's reality.
I do it to process my difficult feelings, of which I have many. I'm an emotional person. I always have been. Psychologists would call me a super feeler. These same mental health professionals, if they took the time and looked at the evidence, would also be able to identify "emotional dysregulation disorder" (better known by its misnomer, "borderline personality disorder".) There are many proven methods for coping with this issue, which I have described as a tornado of thoughts and feelings inside me, and if I can just get them out, the winds calm, the dust settles, and I no longer feel like my inner landscape is flinging cows and cars and flattening buildings. A lot of my writing is like that, melodramatic, hyperbolic, and repetitive, over and over and...
I do it to create evidence, a paper trail, if only of my own account of things. My records are messy, incomplete, embarrassing, and full of contradictions, but they are genuine and real. They are from when I made them. I haven't re-written them or (for the most part) edited them. They truly "are what they are". The completist in me hates that they're housed in different formats, different media, as letters and cards in boxes, loose pieces of paper, sketchbooks, date books, journals, some as files on my computer, in the cloud, even a puffy diary with a teddy bear on the cover from when I was 15. But, I will not be gaslit because that's not how you remember it. I wrote it down when it happened, and I still have my account. Others can go on about the way they believe things happened, but I have tangible evidence of my truth. I won't be convinced that I experienced it differently than I did.
I do it in case my kid ever wants to know my truth. She better bring a helmet though, cuz it'll be a rough ride.
I do it to gather content for the tell-all that I'm certain will one day be written about my fascinating life.
What I hadn't considered until decades into generating this evidence: what will happen to all of these papers and files and photos and mementos when I'm gone?
When I did my estate planning, I told my family: DO NOT read my personal writings. You will be sorry. Once you read them, you can't unread them. They will haunt you. I won't haunt you because I'll be dead and that's it for me, but my words will torment you: the fury, self-pity, inanity, jealousy, insecurity, panic, envy, yearning, broken hearts, betrayal, disgust, fear... it's not pretty. It's raw, ugly, inside-out brain soup. My words will leave a psychological stain you can't get out. DO NOT read my private ramblings. You will regret it.
Now, I'm thinking I want to try to preserve them, but to what end? Certainly not my parents, but my kid? She doesn't really want to even talk to me while I'm alive, I can't imagine her being interested in my words after I've passed. Some diary fetishist like me who I've never met? Who could possibly care? Are they to be donated to the Smithsonian? I'm not a historical figure. The Library of Congress?! Pretty sure I'm not that interesting and neither are my records.
As someone who is currently alive, it is difficult to imagine not existing and not being able to control what happens to them.
It's also hard to reconcile that they will be utterly without value once I'm gone. They are so incredibly precious to me. Maybe it's like the body. When I'm dead, my once precious sentient meat body will be so worthless as to be disintegrated back into cosmic dust.
But it's wild to think of the things I possess that will be gladly inherited by friends and family - my art, vinyl albums, collectible furniture, my Heath vase, my Chanel sunglasses, my vintage luggage, all my nice things that are not more meaningful than my life and my intimate writings, but they will outlast me, and they will be more useful to others when my body is done. I don't know how to assess my writings though - they are things - I made them. They will linger on until destroyed. What is their value then?