There was a time when publishing meant safety.
To post something online was to know it wouldn’t be lost to a dying hard drive or a drawer full of obsolete discs. Since 1999, I’ve treated the web as a kind of external memory — a filing cabinet that couldn’t burn down.
But memory has a habit of remembering too much.
Four times now I’ve had to delete or hide what was never meant to be public: a diary fragment, a reflection on coaching, a family outburst, a half-remembered love affair. Each began as something private and harmless, written in the spirit of honesty. Each, when read by someone else, became something else entirely.
A coach took offence at an insight I’d meant only for myself.
A relative disliked the light I’d cast on an old story.
A woman from my youth misread a scene, believing it was hers.
And my late father, even in death, seemed to reach from the grave through the indignant voices of others, asking me to stop digging.
So I did. One by one I made twelve years of posts private. Then, just to be sure, I locked the whole site.
For a while I thought I’d silenced myself. But what I’d really done was discover the difference between writing and publishing. The diary has always been a rehearsal room, not a stage. Anaïs Nin knew it; so did Pepys. They wrote to survive the day, not to perform it. Their true audience was time itself.
I’ve come to think of my writing life now as having three rooms:
The locked study — raw notebooks, session reflections, the things I write before I know why. The reading room — pieces I’ve polished or anonymised, safe for trusted eyes. The gallery — curated fragments, shaped for strangers but still carrying the scent of the original paper.
Everything begins in the first room. Some pieces migrate outward; others stay behind. The movement between them is the real work — the slow act of deciding what belongs to me and what I’m ready to give away.
Being “private by default” isn’t retreat. It’s discipline. It means I can keep faith with the thirteen-year-old boy who first began these diaries, while protecting the people who wandered into his pages uninvited.
The web may still be my archive, but the key now stays in my pocket.
