Fri 13 Jun 2008
Today was almost a bad day, but my supervisor stuck his neck out and saved me from being floated to Long Beach. Altho in retrospect that may not have ended badly cuz then I can visit bridesmaid Sandy and see the teeny little 1-pound kittens she’s currently fostering. What made it a rather unpleasant day, was my finding a CD-Rom of my old diary entries from some years ago and deciding to peek through those entries. I thought it was so long ago that it wouldn’t really affect me. Well, that was a stupid assumption. If you think my blog posts are overly detailed, you should see my diary entries. I read about my dreams, my conversations, my fears, and from my now older, wiser and future perspective, wanted to reach into those words in the past and smack the girl writing them for being too nice and giving, and wanted to strangle the people she wrote about for the games they were playing and red flags that are so obvious now. I’d kept reading because I’d kept hoping that the next day’s entry would lead to her standing up for herself and putting the smack down, that she would get the answers to the questions eating her alive, that she would rise up, shake off the self-doubt and know, know that it’s not her. There’s nothing wrong with her. But I just watched her give more and get emptiness in return, just like I knew the story would go, because she would not wake up for another couple of years.
The only good things I found was that I love my (old) sense of humor which made me laugh out loud, and I love how artistically I was able to write due to the overload of emotions. For example, this was apparently my old AFK message for when I was sleeping:
I’m chasing butterflies while the lilies wave me closer and the weeping willows dip their tendrils into silver to swing by my hair and baptize me…
I was in a crappy mood driving home, and spoke to Dwaine on my cell phone. (Mr. W was busy.) He agreed that it was a dumb thing to do, reliving my past through my diary, and said half-jokingly that if God had meant for us to remember painful past details, he wouldn’t have made us forgetful with time. He said he has days when he’d be driving or something and his thoughts would drift to remember something he’d said in the past that would make him cringe now. I said I’ve had those moments. There are things I’ve said or done that in retrospect I can’t believe I’d said or done, and remembering those totally made me cringe. Dwaine said that the cringing is God’s electric shock teaching us a lesson that we shouldn’t be going around remembering stuff. The laughter made me feel much better. On a more serious note, Dwaine said that the reason I’m upset and cringe is that I’m a different person now from who I was before, and the growth ensures that I don’t let myself be in that past situation again. Amen to that.
Yes, amen to that.
Look how far you’ve come!
Next up: a truly fabulous weekend 🙂
I recently threw away like 4 journals during my clean up and making space for Jay’s stuff. He freaked out when he found out I threw them away until I told him it was all written when I was depressed, sometimes wanted to end my life, dark period in my life. He said “oh.” and understood. Sometimes it’s good to go back and revisit the past and other times it is not!
I definitely know how it goes – to look back and wonder what the heck? but it’s a good thing too – you can see how much progress you’ve made, how you’ve grown or it can simply just remind you of things – memories that you can shelve, knowing you aren’t there anymore.
It’s also fun to think of events now, that you may journal, post about that at the time seemed so intense but in the future, you might do the same – look back and wonder what all the angst was about.
As a side note, everyone has those memories, events that make someone cringe!
Similar posts today…both reflecting on our pasts. Funny how old times make us remember the worse. Did you write about positive things in your diary at the time as well or only the negative?
jericho – yes, thanks! And I followed your recommendation and had a fabu weekend. Photos upcoming.
busykitty – I have a hard time throwing things away that I’d created; they’re like my children. Even tho yes, it’s not good to go back and relive it, I just feel better knowing those archives are there to re-teach me in case I haven’t learned my lessons.
:)me – hey, my entries then remind me of your entries now. But that’s true, I wonder how I’d feel about the posts I write these days in 5 years.
Flat Coke – I’ve thought the same thing, how funny that I remember the bad such to such detail (altho after going back and reading, turns out I actually had forgotten more detail than I’d thought). My diary wasn’t positive or negative, it was just stuff going on, what people said, what I was afraid it meant, where I was afraid things were headed or not headed, and a lot of my confusion about what was going on.