Diary of a Mad – I Mean Really, Really Mad – Wife

I've often thought of excerpting clips from my journal on this site. I'm a firm believer that misery loves company and if there's anything revealed in my journal entries it's misery.
The thing is, I can't bring myself to go back and read them. It feels like trying to go back to sleep after a nightmare. I just don't want to close my eyes and face those frightening images again.
Or face those pages on which my pain is written so clearly.
I've suggested often on this blog that readers keep a journal. And it's advice I stand by.
I've always kept a journal. In fact, I recently pulled out my journal from grade 8, in order to read a passage or two to a grade eight class I was visiting to talk about writing. It had the usual adolescent angst – a vow to "stop letting Allison bug me", the thrilling news that a boy I liked – gasp! – looked at me and his look "lingered"...at least in my imagination, if not reality.
But as I read further, I found a note I had tucked into the book. A note that my mother had written in the midst of psychotic episode. Her alcoholism, combined with a prescription drug addiction led to some pretty wacko times in our family. She spent a number of years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, being misdiagnosed until some exasperated psychiatrist finally told her to get the hell out and go to an AA meeting. She did. And remained sober – and sane – for 25 years until she died in 2007.
That was then. But for me, when I opened that book from 1978 and found that bizarre note, it felt like now. Right this second. I could remember so clearly the anger. The sense of loss. The confusion. Feelings I had so successfully buried.
And feelings that I've quite successfully buried, I fear, again.
The reason I think they're buried rather than "processed" is that I can't bring myself to open my journals from three years ago. I don't want to feel those feelings again. I'm fine. I can function. I can smile and do my job and parent my children and, for the most part, forget that my husband betrayed me in the worst possible way.
Which tells me...it's time to get excavating.

Writing Down the Pain, Part Two

If you weren't swayed by my first blog post about putting your feelings / thoughts / delusions onto the page, perhaps the findings of Ariel Gore, author of Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness will convince you. Gore, curious about what helped women feel happy, asked a dozen to keep a happiness journal. What she discovered, according to the March 2010 issue of Body + Soul magazine, was that "the simple act of recording...moments actually expanded them." In other words, writing down something that makes you happy – your infant's smile as you enter his room in the morning, your dog's wagging tail, the sunshine streaming in a window, discovering that the infidelity diet has rendered you skinny beyond your wildest dreams – actually expands the happiness created.
I remember perfectly the day, a month or two post D-Day and when I was still in the "will I ever feel happy again" phase, I was walking my dogs. I was trying hard to not let my mind go into that dark neighborhood where I obsessed about the OW, details of the affair, myriad ways of killing my husband or myself or both, etc. etc. It had snowed the night before and the lawns were blanketed in white. The sun shone brilliantly. I focused on my dogs. The sunshine. The twinkling snow. And, for a few fleeting moments, I felt happy. At peace. Then my dastardly brain yanked me back into the darkness of my thoughts.
BUT! Later that day, I wrote about that moment. Which expanded it and let me turn it over and over again in my mind. And I was assured – because my journal said do – that happiness was possible. Perhaps even likely.
What Gore notes is that, by noticing, appreciating and documenting those moments, we are more likely to intentionally seek them out. And, it follows logically, the more we seek out those moments that give us happiness, the happier we'll become. Maybe not today. But...soon.

Writing Down the Pain

I started a diary when I was nine. Now, almost 35 years later, I still keep one. At first it was the usual, "my brother's a moron", "I have the biggest zit in the world on my nose", "I have SOOOOOO much homework" type of entries. But it didn't take long for me to realize that within those pages lay my salvation, if not my sanity.
I could say ANYTHING in those pages. And I wouldn't be judged. Or criticized. Or silenced by shame. I admitted things in those pages that I'd never be able to admit to a real flesh-and-blood person.
Then life got busy. And busier. Daily entries gave way to weekly or monthly. Or bi-annually. Writing became my career...so I didn't feel the same pull to write as a hobby. Or as therapy.
Then came betrayal.
And with it, anger and shame and humiliation and a seemingly bottomless sorrow.
I picked up a notebook and started writing.
I wrote about my anger and shame and humiliation and seemingly bottomless sorrow.
I said all the things I couldn't quite bring myself to say to real flesh-and-blood people.
I spewed hatred and fury and thoughts of revenge. I spilled my agony onto those pages...which somehow shored me up enough to contain it the rest of the time.
Writing through the pain saved me. It allowed me an outlet for the hugeness of the feelings that I thought would swallow me.
It allowed me to see, when I read earlier pages, that I was actually moving forward. That, though I felt raw and ragged, I wasn't as raw and ragged as a few days or weeks ago.
"If I don't write to empty my mind," said Lord Byron, "I would go mad."
Dean Koontz acknowledged that "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write...can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition.”
I believe I would have gone mad, but for the ability to put my madness on the page.

Love among the ruins: Healing yourself from betrayal

One friend swam. Each day for an hour, she would pour her heartache into her front crawl, growing stronger each day. Looking back at her daily cleansing, she realizes that she instinctively sought out something that helped her heal from her husband's affair.

Another wrote in her journal, great long entries detailing her agony, her disbelief, her fear of where she would go from here.

I ran. Though I'd given it up for a few years, I suddenly found myself lacing up my runners each night after the kids were in bed. In part because the darkness hid my tears. In part because I just didn't know what else to do with the pent-up anger (well, I had a few ideas, but most of them would have landed me in prison!). And in part because running has always been a form of meditation for me thanks to the rhythmic pounding of feet on pavement.

These rituals of healing can be, quite literally, lifesavers. We re-discover our strength. Or our passion. We work out our boundaries, or devise our plan.

What have you done? Share your stories in the comments section...