UNEXPECTED

I closed my eyes and tried to compose my brain enough to gather the gumption necessary to heave myself off the couch.  Sadly, however, What in the holy hackmatack was that?! was all I could come up with.

I’ve been the recipient of a plethora of looks from my mother over the years, but nothing like what I’d just experienced.  That was something…different.

Could it have something to do with the box?

That did it.  That was the perfect question to spark my curiosity just enough to convince my brain to send the proper signals to my limbs.

I moved to the box and gingerly peeled open the flaps.

Not sure why I felt the need to be ginger about it except that the thought of this being the source of “the look” made me not a little trepidatious.

“Ah,” kind of exploded out of my mouth in a verbal sigh of relief.

More notebooks.

A. LOT. More. Notebooks.

I picked up the one on top and flipped through it just to confirm who had written in it.

Ever heard of a computer, Granny?

I realized that I sounded uncomfortably like my mother at that moment.

Sorry, Granny.  If you wanted to write everything by hand, then more power to ya.

It took me the better part of two hours to comb through the entire box and attempt to lay the notebooks out in some semblance of an order.  Granny had written years at the beginning of every notebook just like with her Bible notebooks, but I discovered that sometimes the year would end without her having filled it or she would need more than one notebook for a year and then the new year would be buried somewhere in the pages.  I had to sort through twenty-one notebooks that spanned a little over seven years.  Either she hadn’t kept her notebooks in order or someone had just tossed everything in the box without any consideration of how she’d arranged them.

I was betting on the latter.

After pushing the piles of notebooks against the wall between my couch and edge of my kitchen floor, I almost started to cut the tape on the box so I could put it in my recycle bin, but I stopped, reminding myself that I might need a way to store the notebooks when I finished reading them.

Which will be in, like, a decade.

Twenty-one notebooks.

They were similar to her other notebooks, only thicker.

Twenty-one.

Well, no time like the present.

I made a cup of tea and took a dive back into Granny’s world.

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November 23

I’m not sure how I feel about devoting an entire journal to chronicling my anger, but I know that I need to do something.

And right now, this seems like the best option available.

That may change in the future and that’s okay for now.

Journaling it is.

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Wait, what???

I actually tossed the journal onto the couch and stared at it.

What did I just read?

That was most definitely NOT what I — I mean, what about God and Jesus and stuff?

Come on, like you think that’s all she ever wrote about.

Okay, so it was a rather ridiculous assumption but she was really rocking my world here.

Granny…angry?

Did that, did she — Granny got angry?

Um, duh-doi.

All right, all right, I know everyone gets angry.  The thought of my feisty, sweet Granny in the throes of anger, though.  I really couldn’t even hold that image in my hands and look at it.

What else was she gonna explode my mind with?

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There are so many reasons why I feel this is important, not the least of which is my health.

Trying to come to grips with Adam’s death has made me realize how little we talk about and deal with anger.

Many people want to talk about mental health these days, but one component that almost never seems to be mentioned is anger.

We feel more comfortable talking about being sad and struggling with grief.

Yet so few are willing to venture into the often terrifying maelstrom that is anger.

And I get it.

Wisdom would seem to dictate that trying to get a firm grasp on anger is like trying to scale Everest in shorts and flip flops.

We don’t want to expose ourselves to such raw elements.

And yet we absolutely must if we are to achieve any semblance of true health.

But I suppose one thing I need to remember is that there’s a difference between anger and rage.

Most people I know never make that distinction, which, I think, is why they don’t want to touch the subject with a universe-sized pole.

The distinction remains, however, and it is paramount that I don’t lose sight of that.

Because I’ve come to firmly believe that sad people don’t commit murder.

Enraged people commit murder.

Taking a life is not an act of sorrow.

It is an act of rage.

And despair is more closely linked to rage than it is to sadness or sorrow.

So here I am, deeply desiring to find restoration, renewal, and healing, understanding that the path will lead me through the valley of shadow and death.

But I know who walks with me and I will keep moving forward.

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Whoah.

Whoah.

And oh yeah, whoah.

I tried — and failed — multiple times to wrap my mind around what I’d read.

This didn’t even seem like the same woman who wrote with such firm conviction and confidence in the other notebooks I’d read.  I mean, it did and it didn’t.  And it was the ‘didn’t’ part that I could not seem to grasp.

Surely this was just, like, a bad hair day and she said a few prayers and got back to being…Granny.

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January 10

Well, I thought this was going to be just about dealing with anger, but now I think it needs to serve more than one purpose.

Since I’m going to be working on other things as well, I’ll be writing about that, too.

Starting with the revelation that I was raised by a narcissist.

It finally makes sense to me why I’ve always struggled to figure out who I am.

My entire existence was consumed by a woman who insisted that the only reason I was put on this earth was to service her.

I had no right to have desires, dreams, needs — my life was to be all about her.

I confess I’m still struggling to wrap my mind around it all.

I mean, I wasn’t forced to live in squalor, I was never deprived of food.

I had a roof over my head and clothes on my back.

But if everything I’m reading is to be believed, those are just the things my brain is telling me to protect me from the truth.

The truth that…

I can scarcely bring myself to write it let alone believe it.

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Orrrrrrr…maybe not.

I stood up.  I couldn’t figure out what else to do.  I sat down again for the same reason.  My mind was buzzing like an agitated wasp but I couldn’t seem to land on any one thought. One short journal entry had blown the doors of my mind clean off.

Why didn’t you ever tell me, Granny?

Right.  Like she would have told a snot-nosed little punk like me anything that intensely personal.  Which got me wondering if she’d ever told anyone.  Surely my mother didn’t know.  Or did she?  Maybe that’s why they never had a Currier and Ives mother/daughter thing going on.

Except that didn’t make any sense.  I mean, if it was Granny’s mother who was the problem, then that wouldn’t have had any impact on her and my mother.  Right?

Yeah, an expert in psychology you are not.

I’m not sure why it happened at that moment, but a thought struck me and I leapt off the couch.  The next fifteen minutes or so were spent flipping through both sets of Granny’s notebooks, comparing years.  I discovered that she had started the journals I was now reading about seven years after the ones I’d already read, but they both ended around the same time.  For some reason, that was an important bit of information to me.

Hang on a sec, Granny was not a young woman when she died.

Both sets of journals ended the year she died, which meant that she didn’t start writing the second set until she was in her late 80s.

Dudely.

I took a moment to be even more impressed with Granny than I already was.  Then it was back to her journal.

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January 31

I never thought I would have a label.

I always considered myself relatively well-adjusted considering what I’ve been through in my life.

Certainly never unhealthy enough to warrant being labeled.

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

That’s a mouthful.

My adaptive self most assuredly did its job.

Oh sure, there have been moments all throughout my life, but I always chalked those up to me being weak or not dealing with sin or simply the struggles common to all human beings.

But now…

My heart hurts so badly.

I am completely shattered and I desperately need to know if God offers any hope for healing to people like me.

He must, right?

I mean, I know we think we’re all that because we’ve come up with all these clinical and scientific labels for the human condition, but people have been people since Man and Woman were booted out of Eden, so that means even when they didn’t have a label for it, people were suffering from the same thing I am.

Why in all my long life have I never heard a single pastor or Bible study teacher talk about it?

Is it because they don’t see mental and emotional health in the pages of the Bible?

All they see is sin and not sin, as if that’s all life consists of and all we need to talk about.

Did God really intend for us to leave mental and emotional health at the front door when we read the Bible?

Did He really intend for us not to use every facility and faculty we’ve been given when we read the Bible?

Are we supposed to set aside the psychological aspects of our beings and not see any psychology in the Bible?

Or did He have the writers and compilers put it together in such a way that we would miss the point and the truth unless we set our imaginations ablaze and applied every discipline available to everything we read in its pages?

February 5

I’m really sick to death of people treating mental and emotional issues like they’re a weakness of character or nothing more than a difference in perspective and reaction.

Why does being a cancer survivor make you a strong person but being a survivor of mental and emotional abuse only means you were obviously weak to begin with since you couldn’t just suck it up and get on with your life like strong people do?

I long for someone to understand in a true and wholehearted way.

I long to have someone love me enough to dive in with every ounce of energy they have instead of telling me it’s too overwhelming and it’s all too much to take in.

I long for someone to hear and listen to my pain without taking it as an indictment against them.

I just want someone to focus on ME.

For just five minutes, I want it to be about me and no one else.

Because I do that all the time for EVERYONE in my life.

Just once before I die, can it please be about me?

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Oh Granny…