I wonder if anyone has advice for someone like me who thinks writing a journal is probably a good idea, but I rarely write because I can hardly bear to read what I've written. I always want to edit it for clarity or just throw it out because I don't like it. I've been able to overcome my perfectionism in a few areas of life, but not this one. I like to read other people's words, but rarely my own.
I actually identified certain behavior patterns in my life by reading my journal, that I was not explicitly aware of when I was writing those entries. Depending on the length of your entries, you could read months or weeks of entries in one go, and have a bird's eye view of your own time that you would never get otherwise. You might also get some insight into your own perception of time; one thing I noticed is that events that happened around 2-3 days ago feel like they "just happened", to me, while events ~4-5 days ago feel much further in the past, and I am more likely not to have the experiences of those days at the front of my mind.
tl;dr: If you power through the discomfort and read your own writing, the result might be interesting enough to offset the discomfort.