A few days ago someone said to me in an email “Stay true to yourself and your own story and you will not get lost.” The problem with that is that throughout my life I did not stay true to myself and my own story and so I did get lost. And I have been lost for a very long time. And I don’t know if it’s possible to find myself. I have been searching around but as yet I haven’t found me.
Today was a long and exhausting day. I am 4 days into avoiding solids. I anticipate getting through the next hour without giving in to any urges to consume solid food so that means I should complete Day 4 successfully. At least I can say that despite all the stresses of the day I remained in control of myself where eating is concerned. I can’t say the same about other things.
My raging mad lunatic came out of me today to deal with a marital issue on my behalf. Since her performance I have had very little in the way of mental focus and emotional energy. I am trying to sort out my feelings right now.
It’s easy to feel responsible for putting everyone in a bad mood with my yelling and screaming; but I didn’t get up and decide I was going to go around yelling and screaming like a lunatic today. Yes it was ugly and yes I am responsible for the actual yelling and screaming that I did. But someone else pushed the button that set me off.
Sometimes when you get all bent out of shape and start running around yelling and screaming at people in your rage, after the dust settles you feel like a monster. All you can think about is the way you were carrying on. And you feel like the bad guy whether or not you were.
For the last 8/9 years I have been trying to prevent certain things from happening in my life. The things that my husband brought into my life during the first 8 years of our marriage were very psychologically damaging. I have panic attacks just at the thought of going through any of that stuff again. I know perfectly well that the only way to avoid it is to leave the marriage; but until I actually leave the marriage, I have to fight to protect myself and safeguard what remains of my sanity.
The morning after
It is 5:40AM. I have been awake for a while. I’m not sure how much sleep I got but it wasn’t a lot. My husband and I did some talking for about an hour and a half between 3:30AM and 5AM this morning. I’ve come away from the conversation realizing that I have a lot of work to do on myself. It’s got nothing to do with my husband. This is work I needed to have done before I got into a relationship in the first place, and it’s work I need to do regardless of what happens with my marriage. I am a wounded soul and while I did not get wounded by my own hands, it isn’t the wounds themselves that are interfering with my ability to find peace in my life. It’s the memory of the wounds and the choices that I keep making out of fear of getting hurt again.
I always say that I should never have gotten married; but I always approach it from the standpoint that I should never have gotten married because my husband isn’t who I thought he was and he isn’t the kind of man I want to have for a husband; but the truth is, I should never have gotten married because I wasn’t mentally or emotionally ready to be in a relationship. I had too many “issues” and I should have been focused on learning to love myself first and foremost. I should have been focused on repairing the damage brought over into my adulthood from my adolescent and teenage years. I should have been focused on finding out who I am; then maybe I could have had some hope of staying true to myself and my own story. But I neglected myself and focused instead on being true to other people and living inside their stories. Now my story has become the story of someone’s mother and someone’s wife. I guess that happens to a lot of women. They become a mother and a wife and suddenly that is all that they are is a mother and a wife. They get lost in these roles and there’s no opportunity for them to play the role of the person they were before taking on the roles of mother and wife.
I wasn’t ready for either of the two roles that have dominated my story since I was eighteen years old. I wasn’t ready to be a mother at eighteen and I wasn’t ready to be a wife at twenty-six. I still had way too much growing that I needed to do; but my growth was stunted and now here I am essentially right where I was before I started playing the part of mommy and wifey.
It is a great message stay true to yourself and your own story and you will not get lost , but what do you do when you are already lost on account of not staying true to yourself and your own story?
