Diaries reveal us or not

[tvordlj]

I'm reading a book "fish, blood & bone" by Leslie Forbes. It's about a young woman who connects with ties of a family that she never knew. There's a lot more than that but the thing i'm getting to will interest a lot of people who keep journals, both online or private.. She's reading a diary of a Victorian anscestor who writes about many things yet the diarist herself remains "elusive". The author goes on to muse .....

"Why? Memory is not a museum, where you have to discard one object to make space for another. It's true that all of us edit our memories to a certain extent; we take out the acts we're ashamed of, the omissions too painful to examine, live our lives in retrospect. But how does a diarist decide what to hide and what to reveal?"

Indeed. Especially when it's a private diary/journal that you don't expect anyone else to ever see.