Beyond the Blog

The good thing about coming down with a raging cold this week, is that it has taken the focus off of my emotional pain. Physical discomfort always trumps feeling blue. I'm ready for this sickness to pack up and leave. I've had two bouts in two weeks and I don't get sick often. It reminds me of how stress and negativity and sadness can take it's toll on us physically. I have had my share of the former lately without a doubt. I think back a year and a half ago and remember how sick I got the very day after my Mom passed away. After weeks of not really caring for myself, it was bound to happen, but the flip of the switch timing was certainly uncanny.

But it's more than just this cold head that is clearing my head. Taking time to write in my journal is ultimately responsible for my renewed emotional clarity. My journal where I can be raw, unedited, anything but vague. My journal that I've basically abandoned for the better part of a year. I love this outlet...this blog is a blessing, and although I have only a few readers I know about, and as far as I know most of my family doesn't even know I blog let alone where to find My Musings if they even wanted to, it's still out there and so I almost always write with that in mind.

I had to chuckle when my friend told me that she doesn't read my blog because she feels she's invading my privacy....(privy to my innermost Freudian thoughts.) She'd probably have a heart attack if she read my journal! What I'm saying is that I'm not That kind of a blogger...a bare your soul, nothing is private, take no prisoners blogger. I struggle with the tenor of this forum trying to be as open and as honest as I am comfortable with while also taking care not to put something out into this www universe that I'll later regret. I don't hide my feelings, there's no mistaking me for Pollyanna, I don't portray my life as perfect. What I do is delineate the days of my life, and this has become such a gift of an outlet for the historian in me.

Writing in my journal yesterday made me realize that I need to make that personal space a priority again for the rest of me. I've more than missed it. I've suffered by suffocating that means of expression. I had an epiphany while I was writing away yesterday working through a complex web of uncomfortable emotions. I started by sorrowfully admitting,

I cannot ever remember a time when I have felt more disconnected and down than I do at this moment.

After a couple pages I felt positively giddy at my aloneness and completely empowered by the power of one.

At the end of the day, I have only myself to hold accountable for my happiness. I have myself! I am responsible only for me!

It was enlightening to give myself permission to value my feelings, my needs, my desires...to acknowledge their importance and to know that for once in a long while...I intend to live like it.

And while that sounds and feels all wonderful and good, it is also a little messy, a tad tricky for the people pleaser in me who doesn't want to hurt feelings and is not very good at expressing fragile emotions either. I retreat, erect walls, and over time my wounds heal and I move forward, but with each transgression, misunderstanding and disappointment that is unaddressed, moving forward is hampered by the building baggage at my back. And really that's the perfect metaphor for my conflict management...a suitcase. I'm always ready to pack up and leave for awhile when I'm hurt, and the people I shut out are left guessing as to why I left so abruptly.

Only here it gets trickier yet. I am insanely intuitive and I tend to assume that other people have that same visceral instinct that I do. That adds up to my assuming that they know what they did, what they said, what they didn't do, what they didn't say that hurt me, when I cannot and should not assume anything. Instead of taking the red eye outta town, I need to give people a chance to tell me not to go.

So the catharsis in all of this is the transition from wanting to blame other people for my sadness, in giving them the power to create my happiness to taking ownership and responsibility for it myself.

And I cannot call it anything other than a sign that when I picked up The Shack the other night after months, this was the first passage I read:

You really don't understand yet. You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through the tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self-centeredness, and power and believing you are on your own and insignificant.