Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Passion to the Third Degree.
My asthma is getting better but I’m zonked. I’m in one of those moods where I don’t want to sleep and don’t want to be awake either.
But the water heater repairman’s come and gone, and I’ve been quietly productive, editing a book that includes journal entries of mine from a year ago. That may have been a mistake.
While there are many things I’ve let go, forgiven, moved on from, when I read certain old journal entries or writings from a specific time frame, I can easily be right back exactlywhere I was then emotionally. I don’t know if it’s just a doorway to the past or if the emotions are so infused in the words that reading them releases them all over again.
Looking back, I don’t really regret any decisions I’ve made, but what I didn’t expect to pop up was so much anger. I guess I’d suppressed a lot of it and didn’t realize it. Having kept a healing journal for over two years, I’ve been able to see a lot of changes by going back and reading about what was going on in my life at different times and how I felt about it then.
One thing I see in re-reading my words and emotions of a year ago was how much drama was ongoing and had been for a long time. Drama that wasn’t mine but I got pulled into it. Or things that weren’t loaded with drama for me but became that way because of little games and power plays that kept me stirred up or upset or thinking things that weren’t necessarily true…or even if they were, could be resolved. I know I became entertainment for a couple of people who liked pulling my strings. Some people really enjoyed that I’m emotional in my nature and that they could say cruel things that would make me cry, but then, I’m the one who let them get close enough to me to know exactly what it would take to devastate me. I gave them the ammunition.
That may be a difficult thing for me to overcome in any future close friendships. The idea of letting myself get close to someone with a mean streak—or letting them get close to me.
I’m hoping that such a boundary isn’t a very high wall that will keep me from allowing new people into my life. I’m hoping that reading old journal entries is simply a doorway into the past emotions, and that I can leave them in the past, along with people who received enjoyment from being manipulative and cruel.
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