A few years ago, I began keeping a journal in a Microsoft Word file, in addition to the handwritten journals I keep.
It was interesting to go through the Word Doc and see the ups and downs from the past few years. I decided I wanted to share some paragraphs from the journals in a segment I’m calling “Notes to Self.”
Some of the paragraphs are inspirational, and most of them are written in second person, as that helped me through the hard times.
Remember that you’re not perfect, and you never will be. You’re starting to unlearn the idea that you need to go through life without making mistakes, without anything bad or difficult happening to you. That’s what life is. The important thing is to learn lessons from it along the way, and then apply those lessons to future situations.
Can God cure loneliness? Certainly not every drop of it. What I mean is can He give me ease and comfort when I’m feeling those pangs that hit me. It’s something I think about often. He’s always with me, yet I forget that. There’s nothing really to be afraid of.
I have pictures of my father stored in my mind from long ago. They’ve become like myths, swollen with meaning, hashed out in therapy sessions over the past ten years.
Remember: there’s still a lot of good and beauty in the world, and there are good people, even though you can’t see it sometimes and all you see is the darkness, that there is a light shining, even if it’s dim sometimes, it still shines and the shine is eternal, and it’s been there since the beginning of time, and maybe, just maybe, that’s where God is.
And remember: that inside of all this pain, and all this raw emotion, that’s where the world’s best art comes from, when it’s channeled into something productive, and all the negativity and the hurt is transformed and turned into something beautiful – the beautiful struggle.
