This daily archiving series is about organizing and dating my journal collection. Today’s sample journal starts about a month and a half after J_____ and I decided we were going to divorce. He is living in Vancouver and I am on the Sunshine Coast with the kids.
See:
Unnecessary Violence Project Explanation and Sample 1 Oct 21, 1992
Today: Journal Start Date February 15, 2002
Cover
Sample Pages
Sample Writing
February 20, 2002
It’s early and I’ve been reading in bed. Anna is doing her makeup and Julian is still asleep. I have a tired cup of coffee beside me. My life seems to be a waiting game of sorts. I want to shed that feeling. I’m about to turn 40. I wonder how long I am destined to live? I am alone, that’s OK. But I want to travel and fuck and share and laugh. I want to be mind blasted by love. Magic. I want to see the world with Anna and Julian. I feel full of direction. In my parenting, my studies, my art. But my spirit is tired or asleep or something. At this moment I could easily shed my clothes and go into the ocean and just drift away. But it’s too cold, and I’d just get a bladder infection. No- this house BEATS with LIFE and I am glad to be a mother. Sometimes, though, I have the overwhelming feeling of: “What is it that is happening?” “What is coming?” “When?”
February 26, 2002
Trying and loving –> then trying not to love. But this didn’t work. So don’t try and let love simply exist.
Too tired to go to North Vancouver today. My kidneys cry to stay home…
What is my destiny?
February 28, 2002
I have to let J____ go – OUT of my being. Out of my heart and my soul. I don’t trust myself to survive another heartache. With him. With anyone. Why does my heart remain committed to him? How do I turn off the light? Do I even know how to live anymore? Where’s the innocence?
March 3, 2002
I am profoundly sad for losing him, but also profoundly sad for not letting him go after the affair with M____. I want to undo myself from our history. Our love. I need to stop thinking. I can’t offer him friendship now.
March 7, 2002
I wish there was a way to have total silence. So that J____ and I can experience life without each other. But we are connected through blood… We are engulfed in each other. But there is unlocking occurring. A disillusionment. The disappointment has passed. Discarded hearts thrown against cement walls. Trampled on by each other. But I have shoved my heart back into my chest, bruised but not defeated. Chewed up, but not beyond recognition. Beating, despite. That’s what I don’t understand? How can it continue to beat?
March 8, 2002
There were two distinct times that J____ expressed to me that he felt a COMPLETE CONNECTION to me:
- When he was in the tub and talked about his deep love for his lover C____ to me while I sat on the bathroom floor and listened…
- When he complained about her and their problems while I listened to him on the phone…
But I had removed myself in those moments in order to listen to him speak of his lover- the woman he had been with for more than a year without my knowledge. I split from my soul… and yet he claims to have felt completely connected to me. Who was he connecting to then?
Psychologically, this is when I broke.
And I realize it was not me he sought– he sought a friend who would just listen. But as a wife, listening to his confusion about his lover, I asked too much of myself.
He didn’t see ME. I could have been anyone. So…
I accept that what I longed for was to be SEEN by him. That I have longed for a life that doesn’t exist. He needs a friend. But I am not the right person. What I need is to be MYSELF when I interact with another person. The alternative is suicide of self.
It is OK to have made mistakes and choices that make me wince.
Sample Drawing
Sample Quote
“Accepting the unacceptable needs no special skills. It only needs awareness.” – SARK
