For years I posted here on this blog. Then one day I stopped writing and didn't write anything for almost as long as I posted here. I've thought many times about trying to revive it. I started it shortly after I got sober and while I was going through breast cancer treatment. It was a way of processing life that I had never done before. By translating the feelings and the experiences into words that felt true and accurate. It was a way of processing life that was public, yet anonymous and secret at the same time. It was the most me I have ever been because you couldn't see me even though you could see everything I thought and felt. It was almost the only thing I had as a way to process what was happening to me, because I couldn't process it together, with anyone.
It wasn't like writing in a journal that no one ever sees. I was even more honest in all those posts than I think I have been in the journal that I have written for the past year. The private one. Where I am censored, sort of. Where I think too hard about what I am writing and how it sounds and where it leads and doesn't lead. Where I am writing with a purpose, to uncover the truth, except I haven't. This feels more like telling a story and I think I found more answers in the unfolding of it all than I do when I'm trying so hard to uncover it.
A friend in AA told me a long time ago that there is something very powerful about being seen and heard. Not physically seen or heard obviously, but the real you, in all of your imperfection and pain, or maybe even joy. I wouldn't know though because the most anyone has ever seen of me is through words, on a page, where I can be me, and you can be you, because it doesn't matter anyway. And that was a long time ago. I've wondered lately if there is power in that experience. Probably. I've wondered if that is one of the parts that I have been missing. A real connection to other people that can only happen when you let yourself be seen. Not just the parts of me that look nice, or that I choose to show to you, but the parts that I don't want anyone to know about. Which is the pain. The feelings. It has always been the feelings that I hide from people.
Anyway, things have a way of undoing us, and time doesn't always put the pieces back together, even though lots of people say it does. That's all I was doing. Trying, word by word, story by story, over months and years, to reassemble whatever was left into something I recognized. And then I eventually realized that no matter how hard you try, something will always be missing. Because sometimes life changes you like that. In a split second. Pieces get lost. Parts of you are unrecoverable. I have missed some of those parts. What came together after all that time was fragmented and incomplete. I didn't add up. When I realized I couldn't get back to the person that I was on May 14th of 2006, and that I was never going to be the same, I stopped writing, stopped trying. I was going to have to be ok with what was left of me, in the haphazard way it all came together, with parts missing.
And then in the intervening years, life kept happening. I continued unraveling. More pieces have gotten lost in the process. It's messier than I thought it would be, this process of coming together, sort of, and then coming apart again. It's complicated and confusing. Most things only look gray to me now. Not the black and white that everything once was. I've been trying though. Lately. To put the pieces together again, to get them to stay. And color them in with prettier colors and things that aren't me. It isn't me. This isn't me. This is who I tell myself to be. Or who I think I should be. Or who someone else told me to be. Or who I think you want me to be. But it isn't me.
So I thought I would try this out again. This way of processing the parts of me that don't fit together anymore. This way of processing my way through the things that have happened, and a whole lot has happened in the past 5 years. This way of processing feelings. I know I found truth in the pages before. I know I was, at the very least honest, even if it wasn't what other people may have wanted to hear, or wasn't packaged up perfectly with a ribbon around it.
There has always been a disconnect inside of me. A disconnect between my experiences and feelings. Face to face I can tell you my stories like they happened to someone else. Because I put the feelings in a box, and the box on a shelf, and I won't open it for anyone. And then the story is just words. I keep thinking lately that this disconnect is the problem. I need to be able to feel it while I am saying it. At least I think anyway. And I need to be able to do this somewhere other than on "paper." I know this isn't what my friend meant, but it was only in these pages that I was able to connect the experience to the feelings and have it come out in words that accurately reflected me. I have to start somewhere. Maybe what my friend told me is true though, and I would find at least some of the missing parts of myself, if I allowed the disconnected parts of me to come together while falling apart and allowing someone else to be in that place with me.
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