Journaling before and after coming out: working it out before anyone else has an opinion

Long before anyone is told, there is usually a private stretch where you are working something out with no safe person to work it out with. Every conversation about it would be a disclosure, and you are not ready to disclose anything, possibly including to yourself.

That is the exact situation a locked journal is built for, and it is why so much of this writing gets done at two in the morning.

You are allowed to be uncertain in writing

One of the strange pressures here is that people expect a finished answer. You are supposed to know, and to have known all along, and to be able to say it in one clean sentence.

On a page you can be unsure, change your mind, use a word for a week and drop it, write something and think it is wrong the next day. That is how most people actually get to certainty, and there is nowhere else it is safe to do it.

Plan the conversations before you have them

Write who you would tell first, what you would say, and what you would do if it went badly. Coming out is often described as one event and is in fact dozens of separate conversations over years.

Planning the first few in writing is practical rather than dramatic. It means you have a sentence ready, and you have already thought about where you would sleep that night if you needed to, which is a real consideration for some people and not a morbid one.

Record how they actually went

What was said, what surprised you, who was better than you expected and who was worse. This is worth having because the versions harden quickly, and because you will be deciding for years who else to tell based on this evidence.

It also captures the good ones. People remember the bad reactions in detail and compress the accepting ones into a shrug, which is not a fair record of what happened.

Write the part that is not about other people

Relief, grief for a life you had assumed, anger about the years it took, joy that feels unfamiliar. Almost all the public conversation is about other people's reactions, and very little of it is about what this is like from the inside.

Start your own private journal tonight.

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Free to start. Your stories stay encrypted on your device.

Prompts for the private stretch

• What is true today, even if it is unfinished?
• Who would I tell first, and what would I say?
• What am I afraid of, specifically?
• How did that conversation actually go?
• What has been good about this that I have not said?

Safety is a real consideration

For some people, in some families and some countries, being outed carries serious consequences. There is no obligation to tell anyone on any timeline, and a private record is not a lesser version of honesty. Where it is not safe, look for an organisation in your country that supports people in your situation before you tell anyone close to you.

Why the lock matters here

This is one of the clearest cases where a journal that can be opened by a parent, a partner or an employer is not just uncomfortable but genuinely unsafe. It is also why so many people write nothing at all during the period they most need to.

Innera keeps every story encrypted on your device, so you can write the truth long before you have decided who gets to hear it.