Duly Noted

Journaling has literally saved my life. When I received my first diary in the 3rd grade I didn’t realize how integral to my life this habit would be. Many decades later, writing saved me when nothing else could.

I had reached a point in the marriage where I knew that things weren’t good, but I didn’t have the capacity to calculate what was wrong. We had arrived in New Jersey in 2011 and the relationship took a sudden nose dive. The isolation of being somewhere new only served to highlight just how bad it was being married to mr horrible. Behavior that in the past had been tolerable thanks to being too busy to notice, now was intolerable because I had nothing else to distract me.

Despite this glaring evidence, I needed more convincing that this state was not only abnormal, that it was detrimental to my long term mental health. That is where the power of the journals comes in.

I had reached a point in early 2012 where I couldn’t stand to be near mr horrible. So I decided to create distance in the home by sleeping downstairs on the couch in the game room. It also happened to be where I had a bookcase which held my journals. Journals that for some reason I couldn’t find the entire time we were living in Virginia. Since they had resurfaced after the unpacking, I wanted to reread them. I was hoping they would help me figure out how I got to this point. And help me decide where I go from here.

We’d been married for thirteen years, but there were some years, specifically the 3yrs we lived in Florida, and the years in Virginia before we bought the first house, that I could not remember. This not remembering was stressing me out. How could I not recall 5-6yrs of my life? I felt like something had to have happened that my mind was trying to protect me from by shielding me from the truth. And I had to know what it was I was missing.