Family members read woman’s very personal letters: ‘They confessed that all of us being in the living room, they entered my room and started rummaging through my things’

This might be a normalized family dynamic, but that doesn’t make it good

I remember once a family member read my diary; it was one of the most traumatic things to ever happen to me. It wasn’t that I had anything terrible in it; it was the experience of someone reading your most intimate thoughts, the ones you wouldn’t even confess to your closest friend.

I could never write as freely after that. I used to write with the confidence that nobody would ever read those words, not even me. I wrote without pretension, style, or goal. My writing had no artistic value; it was just that- writing. It was just my emotions, my thoughts, my dreams, clashing against each other in a very delicate tapestry.

The beauty was the bigger picture. It was the letter I was sending to the future, years later (maybe today), when I grabbed those diaries and read my most ordinary thoughts from back then and found them so distant, so strange, so naive.

The incident passed for everyone else, except for me. It still has a place in my heart, and it will forever. I know I’ll find a way to write about it someday, and it might become another story, one of those that only happen to writers. But it was tough; it was defining.

I guess at some point, your art has to crash into the real world, and with time, what you do with the debris becomes your art.

I’m not saying that what happened to this woman was about art at all; I just digressed, but I know how much an intrusion into your privacy can hurt. All you can do is protect it more, and if you need to, stay away from those who put it at risk in the first place, regardless of who they are.