I spent today reading through some old journal entries that I’ve archived over the last fifteen years. It was all so depressing. I was amazed at how often I spoke about wishing to die, and wanting to disappear. I can’t imagine having that mentality now, but I was apparently very ready to be done with my life when I was 22.
Here’s an excerpt I ran across this afternoon, from December 14th, 2004:
It’s impressive to me how angry people in my life can make me. How difficult it is to ignore those impulses to simply tell everyone in my life to go fuck themselves, so I can just stop worrying if the next thing that comes out of their mouth is going to be something to hurt me.
What a horrible feeling to always be terrified that someone is going to break your heart. You can allow people just close enough to get a taste of it, but you shove them away as if they were poison the moment you really start to feel threatened.
You shut down. Close off, and don’t talk. I did that today, and didn’t even realize it until I hung up the phone. I shut out someone in my life that was trying really hard to be there for me, and I just played the same game with them that I have with everyone else. I closed them down. Shut the door, and walked away.
I’m cutting out a few sections, just for the sake of hitting the more “telling” points of my journal. Here’s the next section from the same entry on the same day:
Now, my life is under a microscope. I’ve managed to realize some of the bigger mistakes, but managed to overlook the behaviour that has facilitated those mistakes. I’ve managed to hurt people, apologize for it, but never did anything to modify my attitude toward them so it wouldn’t happen again. You can be sorry for something a thousand times, and mean it, but you’re a fucking fool to make the same mistakes over and over again.
If you can’t change, what’s the point in living in the first place? I certainly don’t want to feel like this for the next several decades. I don’t want to hang around feeling like I’ve just shot my dog for pissing on the rug. Even after this long, I can’t seem to succeed in maintaining a happy medium with myself, my friends, my family, or my love interests.
I once wrote that I am having trouble seeing past the valley in my life, but really, I’m much more afraid that I’m at the peak.
Wow. Talk about not seeing past the bend in the road. There’s something to be said for this previous journal entry, and I’m glad that I still have it. It was a measly five years ago that I was ready to die, simply because I was alone and I was tired of feeling like I wasn’t making any progress in my life.
At the time I was 22 (almost 23), divorced, jobless, homeless, most of my friends had died, and I didn’t feel like I had anyone to lean on. I’d ostricized myself from my remaining family and, as a result, I was left with nothing.
Today, I have a wonderful girlfriend, a good paying job, a good relationship with my father, family, and I have a lot of friends. I have a successful band, I live in a great house in a good neighborhood, and I’m happy. I am happy. Looking through my journal entries for the past fifteen years, none of them have ever had a sense of happiness attached to them. There was always some dark cloud overhanging my thoughts and my days.
For the first time ever, I would like to say unequivocally, and without reservation, that regardless of what happens in the next week, month, year, or decade… I’m finally happy. I finally made it.