I spent most of my return time to this blog unsuccessfully attempting to figure out how to link it with my other blog. I also sat and thought about whether I was too honest in some of my postings, and might want to retreat a little from sharing things in my life that I can't boast about, and that don't necessarily paint me in the most positive light. There are a couple of things I have blogged about, and a lot more things I haven't (since I am sporadic about it at best) that I wish I could make disappear so that I would feel more admirable, more appealing, more "normal." Being open is difficult, and not something I do well unless it is with my closest friends, or when I have no choice because I am unable to hide my shortcomings. I did use to say a lot of things about how I would not allow people to make me feel ashamed or silence me from telling the truth, and that I refused to try to paint over the bad things in life. My childhood was filled with ignoring reality and trying to pretend that things were neat, orderly, and correct, instead of chaotic, painful, and filled with fear. I never wanted to return to that, and so I vowed to do the exact opposite in my adult life.
But the truth is, I want to be liked and accepted. I want people to think well of me. If things aren't the way I want them to be, and I am not the person I want to be, than I tend to redouble my efforts to make things look good, as if by changing the presentation I can alter reality. It's not that I never was forthright, but again, it was to select people and in situations that felt safe. To put it mildly, all of that tends to fall apart when your marriage collapses, you lose jobs, and you have a mental and emotional breakdown. Any self-confidence turns to shame. It may be that your marriage was struggling from the beginning. It may be that while talking about being a Christian you felt condemned instead of free because you thought it was up to you and all you did was fail to live up to the standards. It may be that you suppressed the depression and despair for years, but lets face it; no one really cares about all of that as long as you can keep (pardon my language) your shit together. When all of that garbage is out on the table, it isn't really something anyone cares to see, but when you spend weeks at a time in the hospital, and your marriage ends, there is really no hiding. Not only do you expose yourself simply by "falling apart," but you also feel like you have an obligation to explain to everyone and their brother what your personal issues are, as if you need to apologize endlessly for your failures, and justify your existence and misery somehow when you don't even feel that it's justified. You are the object of pity, worry, and often understandable anger and confusion, and your family, loved ones, and even strangers think that if you do something as crazy and stupid as trying to take your own life, than your privacy is forfeit. Your every thought and motivation is up for examination and demands are placed that they must be revealed. There is no longer a decision about the self that you want to put out there, and people are left to draw their own conclusions, which are largely influenced by things like whether or not they believe in such a thing as mental illness, whether they think you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, whether they factor in spiritual influences or past trauma, and whether they decide to stand by you or to walk away.
After all of that it would make sense to retreat and begin working on rebuilding my self image. It would make sense to try to get a really great job or return to college and achieve high marks, and take on social causes and try to be a really good person to earn respect again. Every month, every year that passes would be one I could check off against what sees like, and partly may be, a really incredibly enormous series of mistakes, mental illness, misinformation, lack of understanding, deep depression, and bad decisions. The hope would be that it some point I would have worked hard enough and distanced myself enough from this chapter of my life that I could sweep it under the rug and maybe vaguely refer to it as "a difficult time."
A big part of me wants to do that, and it might seem like the best path to some people. So why wouldn't I? Back to the beginning of this blog, when I said I am tempted to erase the blogs that reveal embarrassing or personal things that make me and others uncomfortable. I won't do that either, because this is my story, and I can't rewrite it to make it conform to what society approves of, or what I would have wanted. I hope healing and redemption and new life can come out of it, but whatever the result, it will be influenced by this time in my life. I don't like it, I would not have chosen it, and I do worry about what people will think of me as a result of it, but ultimately my flaws don't define me. What God thinks about and says about me does, and He sees the mess I am, and doesn't say like so many other people, "Go clean your act up and then we'll talk," but "I see the mess you are and that is why I sent my Son. Come just the way you are." That's the truth I often don't believe the way I should, but that also sets me free from going back into hiding.
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