I'm not sure yet how I feel about today. I woke up feeling all right, and somewhere between there an now I kind of just crashed.
Granted, my blood sugar drops faster than I'm used to with these meds and I let my meds lapse for about half an hour. I think there may be more to it though. I may be a coward, unable to strike up a conversation with anyone. Or, that particular environment may be a bit emotionally toxic. I tend to feel a bit...blah...after leaving that one Starbucks, so maybe that's it. All of the energy of people with no real hope for the future and no interest in gaining hope, so busy drinking the poison that they don't care that I'm standing there holding out the antidote.
I'm very opinionated, by the way.
It occurs to me that people may end up reading this who don't know me, and who (obviously) haven't read my other journals over the past year so don't know what the heck is going on. Allow me to give you some information.
I'm Laura. I'm almost 20. I'm married. I own a business. I have chemical imbalance problems that requiire some medication to remedy - though the amount that I take is barely considered a trace amount. The meds are like eyeglasses...but for my brain. When they're in my system everything is focused and clear, and I can actually see what is going on.
What else? Did I mention that I'm almost 20 and newly married? That means I often get....overemotional. I also have a pretty big vocabulary and don't always fully understand the emotional impact of my words so I use the wrong ones. I also sometimes know exactly what I'm saying and how it's being percieved but in my altered emotional state it makes perfect sense to use that particular word or phrase when in reality it makes no sense at all.
I'm still learning. If we're talking in terms of actual real-world experience, I'm probably about a year old. Fortunately I have an amazing husband who *usually* gets me (how much can a man ever really understand a woman, after all) and a couple of mentors who have good heads on their shoulders and a lot of experience under their belts. Plus, I have my faith.
About that, I'm working on it. I'm not anywhere near perfect. I often screw up. But I've recently committed to really, really working on myself and one of the things I'm working on is my faith.
My story, in breif, is this:
I'm the oldest child, the firstborn, which means I'm the ones my parents accidentally screwed up the most on. I don't blame them - at least I try not to anymore. They've really done what they thought was best with what they had.
I had a spoiled-rotten early childhood as a single child and then I suddenly had two brothers about 13 months apart from each other. Throughout the course of the next, oh, thirteen or fourteen years I got three more siblings.
We grew up poor. Lower-middle class if that.
As a child I was mean, and misinformed, and overzealous. Thus, I had no friends. This may have had something to do with psychological damage I wasn't aware I had from repeated instances of sexual abuse that I didn't remember until later on in life. Repressed memories are ... well, often difficult to handle or understand. And play a major role in how you react to the world around you.
Sometime in middle school I started to figure out who I was, and I started being nicer. And I had friends. But then for some reason I figured out that I was weird and got insecure and tried to be normal, and then I had no friends again. This was an on-again, off-again process throughout high school.
Somewhere in high school my parents split up and it was rough. Then they got back together and it was rougher. I didn't actually recover from that for a long time, and I'm still dealing with a lot of emotional damage from that. But I'm dealing with it and that's the important part. I gained a lot of weight during that time, indulging my sweet tooth until it developed into a full-on obsession with eating as much food as possible at any given time. By the end of that ordeal I weighed somewhere around 260. I'm still working on that one, too. More on that later.
I had an online best friend for...a long time...who eventually turned into an online boyfriend who, at the end of Junior year, turned into an in-person boyfriend. That went badly. We were good best pals, but really bad mates. Within a month or so of running away from home and moving in with him, I was back home. We hurt each other a lot. He's still pretty special to me, and probably always will be, but for his sake - and maybe even for mine - we don't talk anymore.
Two weeks later, still damaged and refusing to accept my family as they were (and chemically unstable, which I didn't know until recently and could have had a major impact on the overall situation), I left again. I moved in with another online boyfriend, this one I'd only known for two weeks but convinced myself I was in love with. He lived in what I considered to be a whole other world, the alternate lifestyle of BDSM. I thought I knew what I was getting into and that I could handle it, I had no idea.
That relationship quickly turned into an abusive one and went under. The physical force was something I was expecting, but there was also some pretty severe emotional and psychological abuse, coupled with periods of neglect and super-high stress. I stuck with it anyway. I wasn't about to run home again and I was convinced that I loved him, that there was just something wrong with me, the whole typical abused-woman stockholm-syndrome deal. Between all of this and the chemical imbalance I didn't know about, I tumbled into a severe depressive cycle and contemplated suicide several times.
My best friend beat me to it. As much as I regret and mourn the loss of him, his death - and how the guy I was with reacted to it - was the shock my system needed. I started looking around, and with the help of some very intelligent women in the "community" I saw what I'd refused to see before. But I still refused to admit to what I was seeing. I tried to salvage the relationship, even tried the "just being friends" thing, and every attempt just added rocks to the landslide that was already in progress.
Sounds like my life was crap to this point? Yeah...it mostly was. But then came the bright spot.
Dearest, my husband.
We met because I needed to live somewhere other than with the man we'll call "J" and Dearest had an extra room in his house. He also had a wife. In my damaged state, he was my safest bet.
Here's the part where you'll probably lose some respect for me. Keep in mind that at this point I had walked away from all religion and morality. Which means I was basically just so much flotsam and jetsam.
I rented the room Dearest had to offer and moved in sooner than I thought I would - as in the weekend after I met him. We met on a Wednesday and that Saturday we got together to talk about the conditions of renting (also the day that J kindly decided to kick me out early and have biased third party pack up what they percieved to be mine and leave it in a parking lot for me to pick up). Somewhere between first meeting him and the move-in, I decided I was going to seduce him. I don't remember exactly what was going through my mind. I've burned the journals that held those thoughts since they also contained so much of J and indulging my pyromaniac urges once in a while proves therapeutic.
By the end of the night on Saturday, we were having an affair.
Obviously, him being so willing a participant meant the relationship was screwed up from the get-go and it turned out to be yet another situation where I didn't have any clue what I was really getting into. But I survived it, despite several attempts on my sanity, health, and general well-being from the slighted party in the process. Evetually she left, and they divorced. I say eventually but it was only about two months.
So there it is, I was a homewrecker. Sinners saved by grace, anyone?
As it turned out she was cheating too, not that it really matters now. She had a screwy world perspective and an unrealistic idea of marriage and...well, I could go on but this isn't about her.
Dearest has been a true bright spot though. He got me through a lot of the crap that I had to deal with following my severely damaging relationship (and the equally severely damaging break-off of that relationship) with J. I'm talking nightmares I'd wake up screaming and spasming from, irrational fears, emotional baggage up the wazoo, a couple of health issues, and a need for some SERIOUS reprogramming thanks to the oddly subtle and effective brainwashing J implimented - however unconsciously.
I started a business, somewhere in all the drama following the split with J and my mentors...well, I didn't exactly have them. My fault, really. I hid from them because I was embarrassed about my past and the things I'd done - and allowed to be done to me. I was ashamed of my damage.
I found my true salvation in church, the one place I'd been running from for close to three years at that point. I know three years doesn't sound like a lot, but consider that I'm 20. Three years is an eternety.
For a while my relationship with Dearest had some rough patches. Between my damage from my past, his damage from his past, both of us being staunchly anti-religion for a while (him much longer than me since he's got 12 years on me), and neither of us having any idea how to properly pull off a healthy relationship...let's just say we were in trouble. Big trouble.
But it turns out that the start to our salvation was in the business I had started, and the system of mentors and people who have gone before us therein. We went to a big conference, met a whole bunch of people who just had something we wanted - inner peace, happiness, that kind of thing - and got a book that was influential in saving our relationship.
All of this inspired us to try out church, so we church-hopped for a while before trying one of the larger curches (I think they're actually considered a mega-church) in the area. CFC (Christian Faith Center) (www.christianfaithcenter.cc) quickly became our home. The pastoral family (mom, dad, and one of the three kids are all pastors at the church) is amazing and the sermons we hear are always on-queue with what we need in our lives at that time. We got saved in December, Dearest for the first time in a long time, me for the...fifth, sixth, fifty-second? (I think that growing up in the church I did was a disadvantage. I was constantly being reborn...and never going anywhere past that).
After that our lives started seriously turning around. We've experienced some troubles - medical stuff, mostly. Plus backlash from the divorce and the struggle to get out of debt while running a business together. Fortunately our mentors are amazing and the business model we're using coupled with the mentorship and growth system is ... just phenominal, really. I feel so blessed.
Dearest and I were married in May, by the way.
Throughout the whole thing, all of the suckage and damage and crap, I feel like I've been guided. I look back and I can't think of any descisions along the way from, gosh, twelve years old onward, that could have been made differently without having a serious impact on whether or not I even met Dearest. Not to mention whether I would have been ready for him, whether I would have met the guy who introduced us to our mentors, whether we would have gone to church, any of it. ...With the possible exception of all the extra doughnuts, birthday cake, cheeseburgers, etc.
By the way, God, thanks. Again. It's pretty amazing the way you put all of that together.
This is probably one of those things you're going to find me musing over a lot.
Oh yeah, I'm long-winded too. And I have the writing style of a storyteller - Basically, I try to type it the way I think it would sound if I were saying it and that means it often ends up looking a little weird. Gramarically incorrect, occasional misspelled or made up word, so on and so forth.
So...that's my story to this point. I look back now on the person I was a year ago when I left J and met Dearest....and I'm amazed. Amazed that I was ever there, amazed at how far I've come, amazed that God still has some freaking patience for me and even more amazed that my husband does! I feel so incredibly blessed that sometimes it makes me cry. I'm...We're...finally on the right path. Finally.
I'll talk more about that, in another post. I think this one is more than long enough now and should be posted before I make it any more impossible to read in one setting.
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