Then I discovered cards I had received when I left Wisconsin, one from my colleagues and one from my community choir. I lingered over those a bit as I tried to put faces to as many names as I could. I admit though that with time my memory has faded as to the ones I knew more superficially.
And then I discovered a journal. I was constantly writing but never very consistently so half-filled journals and notebooks stashed in random places and forgotten websites are my reality. I feel like each new one I have discovered over the past almost two years has shown up at the exact moment I was ready to glean something from it.
This one covered the time period of about January 2013 to early 2017, with a random entry from 2019. During some periods of this time, I wrote every couple of days. Other times, it was a few times a month, and there are a few gaps of a few of months. It was a fascinating read.
First, in that four years of time, there are only 3 or 4 entries that mention my ex-husband. There's almost a 2 year gap between two of those entries. It's like he was only superficially part of my life even at that point. In the earliest entry, I was very hurt by something he said that reflected how he was treating me.
In the other entries, I gush on and on about my love and how unconditional it is with not a single reference to whether or not he loves me or how he adds to my life. It's all about what I can do for him, how I can support him, and in one case how I'm willing to sacrifice for him. Some of those entries almost read as if I was trying to convince myself of something. If you read between the lines of one of the entries, I think I recognized that he didn't love me back, at least not in the same way.
But those few entries are not the most fascinating parts. This is the time period where I hit rock bottom with regards to my chronic pelvic, back, and hip pain (especially towards the end of 2014 and beginning of 2015). I wore a TENS unit daily. I carried with me narcotics that I prayed I wouldn't have to use on any given day because of how horribly they made me feel. I repeatedly write about the fog the pain left me in, the moments I curled up in a ball on the floor and cried, the fear that there was no end in sight, and the failures I felt when my pain and fogginess interfered with the standards I held myself to. I wrote often about what I was doing to manage the stress that my body was holding in my hips and back. I was so aware of the messages my body was telling me but unwilling to even name the root cause of that stress.
But despite all of that pain and darkness, a huge percentage of entries demonstrate an acute awareness I had for the beauty that surrounded me - the snowflakes, the fallen leaf that followed me, the sound of my car, the engineering of an interchange, the smell of the grass, a passing motorcycle "expressing its joy with the world," etc. I was constantly chasing joy to escape the reality of the world I lived in.
And in between the entries of joy, the pages are filled with advice to myself - patience, the power of silence, the importance of perspective, the distancing myself from negativity (in contexts other than my ex-husband), a reminder that I don't need to know exactly where I'm going to begin, encouragement to foster my hobbies (singing, gardening, beading, writing poetry, reading, etc.), and so much more.
I was bullied as a child so I learned to entertain myself, chase joy wherever I could find it, and pick myself up each time I fell apart. So I suppose doing all those same things in my marriage felt familiar. Reading these entries made me wonder how many parallels exist between them and the writings I did as a child on Mucky Island (I'm not sure those writings exist anymore to compare).
No comments:
Post a Comment