So much this (link to Reddit).
Don't worry about not looking great, or clever, or whatever you consider a flattering image of yourself when you read back your journal in a few days, months, years, or decades—yep, I'm that old.
That's fine. No, that's great.
Believe me, no matter what, as long as you wrote honestly about it (not in the sense of writing some supposed indisputable deep truth, in the sense of honestly writing what you were thinking and feeling back then, at that time, no matter how silly) it's worth it and it will be worth reading back.
You have no idea how dearly I miss my old journals were I wrote about my first true love, as a little boy, and later about my second true love, as a young teen. And also, no matter how unflattering it is for me, all I may have written about my many crushes and my countless failed attempt at flirting. Thinking about it, I must have been in love every single day at that time and it must have been a real pain for my best friend who endured all of it—we're still best friends all those years later ;)
Some forty+ years later, I still remember V. wonderful blue eyes and how she smiled and her eyes too, and how badly I wanted to impress her. And how fucking terrorized and excited I was the day I rang her door, completely out of the blue, because it was the last opportunity I could ask her out. I was 14, I had long hair, flowers in one hand (like, really) and my face was tomato red. I still remember how stupidly I smiled when the door opened to let her dad out. He was about to leave for his job, wearing his... cop uniform. He looked at me for more or less an eternity, and the more he looked at me the more I was dying inside.
You can believe me when I tell you that, he was not happy to meet me, and that V. and I did not end up getting married :P
