Tag Archive for 'Journaling Blocks'

Loss

We found out today that a very dear friend of ours from years ago that we lost contact with, that she passed away by suicide 2 years ago. She was a survivor and multiple as well. We tried off and on over the years to find her again but we didn’t have any real luck and then today we felt the urge again to go searching online and we located her via her daughter’s myspace page. Someone inside remembered the other last name our friend had at one time versus the last name she had during the latter part of our time together with her years ago. This is what helped us locate her daughter and subsequently her myspace page. Information on her daughter’s site hinted that she may have passed away and so we emailed both her and her daughter and her daughter replied with the news. We are so very saddened by this– the grief definitely surprised us in how it overwhelmed us with choking and sobbing tears that were quickly prevented from coming forth and spewing out uncontrollably. I wish whomever inside is preventing and controlling and pushing it away wouldn’t do that, but I guess they are doing it out of some kind of fear or something. Caryn was a friend that left deeply embedded footprints along our heart and touched our system greatly.

There is so much more to say about her passing, her loss, our grief, and our processing of this news. I guess we aren’t quite ready to delve into it and we are also just utterly exhausted and overwhelmed at the next few days and everything else externally that is screaming at us that needs our attention immediately with energy we just don’t have, and yet we have to find it, as it has reached critical emergency problematic levels.

Most of January we were out of town with Sean visiting his grandmother and other relatives as his grandmother was dying and then she did pass away. She was a great woman that I didn’t have nearly enough time to get to know and whom Sean was pretty close to. I’m just glad that I was able to meet her and spend time with her a little bit in visits since getting to know Sean. I didn’t see her at her best, but there were times when she was more ‘present and coherent’ than at other times we visited, and I feel touched to have known her delightful self.

Leaving the house is a hard thing for us to do, but leaving town is even more challenging. We always need many days or lots of time to recover from being gone. We didn’t have access or convenient access to the Internet while we were away and so that is part of why we haven’t been back to journal until now.

We wish to thank everyone for their responses and we will respond more directly very soon. We’re still just trying to get a handle and grip on life and regaining some ground since coming home.

In many ways we’re still divided about journaling, but it does seem like the shift is more towards journaling and taking the risks that our mother or someone (that we don’t want to know) finds it and just trying to take the ‘screw it’ attitude if they do. The purpose of this journal is supposed to be for us and then for anyone else who may find something helpful or useful to them. There is more to say about that. Perhaps instead of trying to process it internally we need to just process it externally in our journal about the process and divided thoughts and feelings about journaling openly here as well as scanning our handwritten journal here. Ha. What a concept. Journaling about our attempts to process something internally in order to sort something out, particularly as it relates to journaling here.

So much going on, but we’ve been wanting to update, and this was our attempt to update. I guess we’ll tackle the journaling processing as well as the processing of our loss of our friend, someone we’ve been wanting to reconnect with over the years.

Julies (and others around too, just not sure who)

vulnerability

we think a big part of our silence and inability to write much the last year or two has been this growing fear, worry, anxiety, and awareness that with the right key words, our mother could find our journal. in knowing Sean, it opens us up to her or family searching his full name or what not and a few more key words and our site is surely to be found. we resisted the whole facebook thing, but we finally signed up and of course the mother is a friend along with other family and friends… and many we haven’t even searched for, added, etc., and we’re keenly aware that given the right circumstances, a click here or there if some of our friends’ privacy settings are low that eventually it could lead to our journal.

then there has always been the awareness that we’re so out there or at least can be and there’s always the chance that our mother could accidentally stumble upon our site or someone else who knows enough about me and my life and put things together. if someone read enough, and they knew my mother or my family, they’d probably put it together, even if we used pseudonyms for the people in our life that we mention by first name in our journal. this is why we finally settled on that debate regarding whether to use pseudonyms or not– we decided it didn’t wholly matter as anyone knowing us and our life, family, friends, etc. could figure out who was who even with pseudonyms and so it didn’t make sense. we know on some level which people in our life absolutely require complete anonymity and hope that others who might take issue with it would let us know.

anyway, so we’re thinking that this fear, worry, anxiety, etc. is behind a large part of the silence and struggle with writing anything in our journal. we used to write daily or almost daily… though some of those journal entries are not posted here because we still have to import them. we’ve done a reasonable amount of journal writing in our handwritten journal throughout these periods of silence, but that hasn’t been scanned here.

we want to be the ones with the courage, the braveness, the openness, rawness, etc. that we see other friends and bloggers do. we admire that so much. we want to not care or to feel free to reveal, to tell how it is, to help others in some way hopefully, to share with those who know us (and we know they’ve been to our site or been given the info) so that they can know how we’re doing if they want to know. we want a strong living record of our life, our healing journey, our thoughts, feelings, etc., because so much of it is forgotten and lost somewhere and so much more is captured with words… and words we can return back to for reference, patterns, growth, healing, etc.

instead the silence lives and we argue and are divided inside about so many different thoughts, ideas, feelings, philosophies, dynamics, etc. regarding whether to journal or not journal. we’ve debated whether to go to all password posts and whether to just push past all of this and be an open book and whether there is some kind of balance. in the midst of all of this, we end up at this standstill, the standstill and safety of silence. but where does that get us? silence eventually leads to a sense of failure, badness, shame, etc. of its own making because we aren’t writing when there is so so so much going on inside that we need to share, want to share, explore, and take further along that writing and processing brings for us. instead it just sits within, spinning, circling, withering away, with only a small chance of living and not being buried deep within with everything else. our life is about burying things. it is so automatic. even the good things… they get lost or buried and we’re left with only the hope it will be remembered instead of splintered and scattered pieces or nothing of it left.

we know it really boils down to whether we can handle our mother or someone else we know that we prefer to keep this journal private and away from them, from whether we can handle and accept that happening and the potential effects of that. we aren’t worried about the father because we’re pretty sure he is fairly computer illiterate or really doesn’t use a pc much at all. there’s always the worry that if we post links or info about a certain friend that our brother might decide to google her and eventually find our site and then that would be bad as our family would then know.

there’s just so much about this topic and issue and there’s a lot more bottom lines that we know exist besides what we just wrote. we’re not sure how to settle this within as there are loud and competing philosophies and ideas and stuff about this topic and uggh, it sucks.

this has been going on for us for a long time, and we’ve been fighting it within for a long time, and lately it seems, the silence is winning the battle. the ‘do nothing’, ‘say nothing,’ etc. because it is safer seems to be the default right now. and there are quite a few of us that want it different or think we want it different or something.

so here’s a start to conquering this and finding a solution for ourselves.

julie/s, julies, Julies

A New Day, Again

So we’re trying once again to write in our journal on a very regular, daily or near daily basis.  We have been writing a reasonable amount in our handwritten journal, but alas, we have yet to scan those entries and post them here.

So as our dearly loved friend, Naomi, says in her song, A New Day, which can be listened and/or purchased here along with her other songs, we are once again at the start of A New Day, A New Way, and A New Chapter in our life. We’ve been gearing ourselves up for more changes, particularly as it relates to journal writing, working on our website, and of course the usual challenges and strivings towards changes and healing with everything in our life.

We realized recently that our one year Engagement Anniversary was coming up and we decided that was when we’d begin anew with our journal writing. Of course the funny thing is that eventually we’ll scan old handwritten journal entries and back date them here so it will be slightly irrelevant, but we like to believe that it is fitting to have these changes happen on such a special day for us. :-)

So today we will be celebrating our one year Engagement with Sean and his system. :-) It’s our turn to surprise him/them with extra love, attention, and celebration. We’re both very broke financially, but we’ve managed to come up with some ideas on how to spend time together without cost, other than a small splurge to the very early matinee of Where The Wild Things Are for the kids. We’re making breakfast for him and so we shouldn’t feel the need to buy junk food and things at the movie theater. We’re making all the meals today for Sean, planning a nice candle lit dinner, a very early matinee kids movie, playing some cards together, playing with Zoi (our amazing dog), talking, cuddling, maybe watching a movie at home later tonight (not sure what exactly, but will figure something out for us teens and adults) and then more grown up time. ;-) So anyway, we’re looking forward to today with him/them.

On October 25, 2007, Sean and his system came to a multiples support group that we attend, and our paths in life crossed. On March 25, 2008 (totally not on purpose date and number wise, it just happened that way), we went on our first date together. On October 25, 2008, Sean proposed to me on a bridge overlooking a huge waterfall and there were many other wonderful details he thought of and surprised us with. :-) And today, October 25, 2009, we have been happily engaged for a year and we are looking forward to our future together with him/them. We have a really good relationship with them and it’s interesting and amazing to discover how having a significant other, partner, who loves all of you, accepts all of you, and is safe for everyone inside to be around, how it can really make a big impact and difference in a person’s life. In this case, my life, our life, our lives. It doesn’t fix all the bad stuff, the hard things, the things that are wrong with us, the things we’re working on, etc., but it does help and it does make a difference, one that we couldn’t have ever really understood until Sean and all came into our lives. We are very thankful and aware of the blessing we’ve received with Sean and all loving us and being in our life/lives.

Changing topics here…

We haven’t been sleeping at night the last few nights and only getting some naps in the daytime or early evening. So now I’m exhausted and thinking of trying to take a very brief nap before our big day begins. We’ll be back to write more about how we’re doing and what’s been going on with us regarding therapy and healing and other life things.

Julies