Candid

I’ve always just kind of coasted through the holiday season, and it probably comes as no surprise that I feel depressed, bored, and basically emptied of motivation this year. Is it possible to just die of ennui? Does that only happen to Victorian upper class heroines with tuberculosis? I don’t feel so irritable since I started the Cymbalta, which is good, but I still get pretty down from missing Sarah and feeling like my life is empty.

I got really down a couple of weeks ago when my Dad gave me some of the journals he kept in the 80’s back around the time he and my Mom separated for a couple of years. My Dad has been sharing a lot of memorabilia and family history with me, and this was I guess part of that. The journals were very heartfelt on his part, and they went over events that were difficult and painful for me to remember.

Let me digress to say that I had a boyfriend, J-, back in the 90’s, whose mother had died when he was still a little kid, and she left behind a bunch of journals. J and his siblings got ahold of them when they were teenagers and read remarks she’d made about their personalities, or about different incidents, and it convinced them that their mother hadn’t really loved or wanted them or loved other siblings more than them. Eventually their father took the journals and destroyed them.

At the time J- told me this story, I didn’t think the remarks in his mother’s journal sounded terribly critical. I wasn’t sure why they caused so much stress. But after reading my father’s journal my lifelong feelings that my own mother didn’t want or like me very much felt very strong. And, surprise! That kind of expanded into feeling unlikeable and not very good about myself.

I’m probably being overly candid here, and oversharing, and I’m going to get a lot of those remarks from people like “You are so candid, it’s remarkable how much insight you have into yourself!” But I think I haven’t been writing a lot lately because I just can’t bear to share how I really feel, to put down in this blog what I’m really thinking and feeling. So I’m going to try to make an effort to do that.