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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
If you are just coming to my diary for the first time, please read my introductory entry, where I share some background that is important if you plan to follow this diary regularly.
Please also visit my music page, where you can hear samples from my debut CD, I Believe, which features songs written based on experiences shared in this journal.
Well, day 3 has been kind of uneventful. I made breakfast this morning, and it was good. I've been browsing some of her back issues of magazines to see what kind of awesome stuff I can find. Ended up finding a lot of cool stuff!
I don't remember exactly how all of this went. Don't remember the order of things like I would like too. But I suppose that doesn't matter as much as I think it does. Call me obsessive compulsive. This all happened on Saturday night and then some of it carried over to yesterday.
Jana and I were talking about my family life and the fact that my niece is learning to act out on purpose. Sometimes this is funny in a not-funny sort of way. Sometimes it is just plain triggering. She is beginning to do a lot of things that my sister was doing at her age. She's so like my sister that it is scary sometimes. We were talking about this, and somehow I went off on a tangent (not unusual really) about my sister being so hateful so early. Jana knows that I have a dissociative disorder, but she has told me that she doesn't really know that much about it. Well, I was talking about how I was so afraid of my sister and how upset I get with my niece and how guilty I feel for having these reactions. Jana said, "Well, there is a little girl inside of you who still hurts."
Well, things went on from there. I know we went out to eat with some friends of Jana's. I think some of this talk must have happened before we left. In the car, Brad put in Jana's CD on a specific song. The song is called "Heal This Place" and I cannot hear it without crying, even on a good day. I actually sang it at church a few months ago and I was a basket case. It's one of those songs that always cuts to the core, if you know what I mean. Well, I was pretty vulnerable when he put it on, but I made it through and we ate and had fun. On the way back, he put in another CD that had some real powerful songs on it. I lost it right there in thecar in front of strangers. I guess we went in. Ok, now I am remembering how things went.
There was a song on the CD called "Something About My Praise". The idea is God loves our praises. There are tons of songs like that. If I knew the words I'd post them. Part of the reason this song got to me was the song we listened to right before it. They're not consecutive on the CD, but we were skipping around. There was a line in the other song that was something like there have been times I felt untouchable. It was something about feeling untouchable, anyway, and I feel like that a lot (I'll be buying me a CD.) So it was on my mind when "Something About My Praise came on.
All I could hear in my head was a question: Why would God want praise from somebody like me, somebody who spent so much time running away from Him and messing up her life? I lost it. I walked away from the codependency, walked away from a homosexual relationship, walked away from the things that I knew were keeping me from drawing near to Him. But still the shame followed me. It was always there, reminding me of how awful I was for ever doing those things in the first place. It wasn't just that I had done them. It was that I had done them in spite of being in the prime of my life, being straight on the path to everything I wanted. I know that this is not making sense right now, but I will get to it.
It is very hard for me to be here at Jana's. I love her so much, but it is so very hard in some ways. She is somewhere that I wanted to go, somewhere that I once felt called to go, somewhere that I still feel deep inside I am to go... But she is somewhere that I don't know how I could ever go. She sings. That's what her ministry is, what her entire life is. She knows people in the industry. She is starting to make progress in getting somewhere. She has the connections.
Part of this problem is that there is no way I could even get to that point. I can't even afford to make a demo of one song, which is why I went into debt to set up a home studio. It is very much less than perfect, and we'll just say that listening to my own tapes is a very humbling, bittersweet experience. There is a voice in my head telling me that giftedness and creativity and ability have very little to do with whether you make it or not. It is about money.
I'm not exactly living in the slums, but I am not exactly middle class if I was to be living on my own. Um, I'd be way below poverty level. It's called living on SSI. I really do count my blessings that I am not forced to live that way, that I can live with my parents. In spite of how stressful and painful this is, I do appreciate it. But they are not rolling in dough, either. Probably very poor money management on their part--they're not exactly hurting. They're a two-income family with only me living there. I thought they paid off all their debts when we moved to Indiana. I don't know whare the money is going. I just know there is not enough of it. I have given them $400 in the last two weeks for, um, groceries? Do we really eat that much? I think next month I will buy groceries and calculate how much I'm eating. Mom sat there and told me their grocery bills would be significantly less if I wasn't there. Um, I don't exactly eat a whole lot.
I'm going way off on a tangent here. My point was just that they don't have money to pay their own bills, and I am way below poverty status. So if it takes money to do anything much with music, then I won't go anywhere without a miracle.
There is another voice in my head. It says that if this is what God has in mind for me, that is what he'll have me doing, and that's how it goes because He is God and He's in control of this thing. I can sit here and think rationally now about the fact that there are ways to get around the money issues and that God is the one opening or not opening doors here. He doesn't pick the people who have the means. He gives the means to the people He picks.
How does all this tie in with Saturday night? Well, I'll tell you. In 1990 I graduated from high school and went traipsing off to Anderson University. AU was the big university affiliated with the Anderson, Indiana-based Church of God, which was my family's preferred church. AU also had a degree in music industry which I intended to get as a minor to go with a church ministries degree. I was, except for some minor setbacks in social life, happy as a lark! But in the spring of 1992, my life fell apart.
I had made probably the first totally real, mature friendship of my life. Her name was Vicki. We met on line, on a service called GEnie. They didn't have much in the way of Internet back then. We met in purson in the fall of 1991. The next 10 months were for her a living hell. I'll spare you the details except to say that her husband was the most abusive man I have ever met. Couldn't even really hold it together in front of me, and that's a pretty sick man. They lived about 30 minutes away from AU, and I saw Vicki a lot. I even stayed with her in a hotel and helped after she had some major injuries delivered by him.
When I left AU in 1992, I knew I would not see her again. I just knew. It turned out that she died that summer, a supposed suicide. I won't go any farther with this than that. I don't need to upset myself tonight. Anyway, I also knew I would not be going back to AU. I did not have the money. I made other plans, plans to go to Stephen F. Austin State in Texas. The day after I went to transfer student orientation and registered for classes, I got a letter from AU offering me a full year's worth of financial aid.
I won't think of should haves--I don't know what life would have been like for me if I had gone back to AU instead of to SFA. I don't know whether going to SFA was the right or wrong thing. I went, and I went without having made any progress at all in dealing with issues surrounding Vicki's death.
From the time I got there, I know that I was searching for friendship, something that was like the thing I had lost. During the first year, that search was a very minor thing. I was able to carry on with school--even made the Dean's list.
But something else happened that year. (I haven't even covered this with Jana, but writing it out I finally understand.) I lost two other friends. I lost them because I did what was right. Both were friends I had met on line, and they were married. One I lost because I asked him to stop writing to me after discovering that he wanted to divorce his wife and make plans to get involved with me. The other I lost because of a mutual agreement not to communicate. Nothing was going on, but being online was a problem with his family. But those two people were the best friends I had to talk to about the issues related to Vicki's death and a few other things. By the beginning of my second year at SFA, I had lost contact with all of my lifelines of spiritual support.
I joined a group called Chi Alpha, a Christian group affiliated with the Assemblies of God. I met some casual acquaintances there. I met my future husband there. I realized about that time that I had a major aversion to guys, and I tried to fix this by spending time with one. That relationship is a story I will save for another post. The point is that at that time, my life began to be more and more consumed with filling the void left by the loss of my three friends.
It wasn't (at that time) an issue of needing more of God. It was an issue of needing fellowship from the kind of friends who could help me draw nearer to Him. However, the whole thing ran away with me, and eventually this searching became an all-consuming thing which took over every area of my life, even my relationship with God. I never found what I was looking for, and I blamed God. I had my limits about what I would do in this search, but eventually those limits were tested in certain areas. That is how I ended up experimenting with a girl who was bisexual. I'm sure that other things play into this as well, but there is no doubt at all in my mind that my need for total acceptance was the major factor and that this need was even greater by the time I met her because I knew about the dissociation and I knew that she knew and accepted it.
During those early years at SFA, after I had joined Chi Alpha, I was doing some singing at churches. I was sort of working my way up to building up a base of churches who knew me and where I could send demos and eventually start singing apart from Chi Alpha functions. But between some very hurtful things that were said to me by one of the leaders of the group and that blasted search for acceptance, I began to step out of that path. I walked away and left music behind. I wanted to pick it back up again last year, but I knew that I could not sing in church and be living an "alternative" lifestyle. So I walked away from the lifestyle because doing what God had given me the desire, ability, and blessing to do was more important than that lifestyle.
But here I am, with no local friends and not singing. I've caught myself asking, "Is this what I get for doing what's right?" That, I now know, is a part of me that is deeply hurt by the losses from 1992, and obviously I need to work through those issues. I do what's right because I have faith that God will honor me and bless me for it, not because He'll do that immediately. I do what's right because I love God and respect Him, not because I'll get a cookie for doing it.
The rest of this has to do with my guilt about walking away, particularly about going so far as to spend a year living a lifestyle that I knew was wrong. When I was overwhelmed with that guilt during that song, something inside me broke. While I was lost in my tears, something happened. I realized that I've spent this year trying to be good on my own. I walked away because it was the right thing to do, but I walked away without putting my hand back in His, without letting Him hold me, without asking Him to forgive me. I walked away willingly and gladly, but I also walked away bitterly. I walked away condemning myself.
But He never has condemned me. He isn't sitting there thinking that I am a bad child and I need to go to my room and spent 30 minutes thinking about what I've done. (Yes, I had to do that as a child.) He doesn't take my sins and rub my nose in them, especially when I am heartbroken over them. He forgives. He loves. He prepares a huge feast for me at His table!
And if He does this, than how can I not praise Him? And if He prepares such a feast for me just because He sees me returning, then what would He do if I understood fully His goodness and His mercy and thanked Him and praised Him for it? I'm sitting here beating myself up over being such a bad child, and I haven't even looked at the table where all this feast is waiting--for me!!!
The guilt isn't exactly over what I did. It's over the fact that I fear doing it again. But I never asked Him to keep me safe, to keep me from straying, and I certainly haven't been trusting Him to provide what I need that caused me to go running off in the first place! If I did these things, surely He would enable me to resist the temptations brought on by that emptiness! I am not a bad child. I'm just a child and I desperately need a Father. Too often I think of God like I think of my earthly father. I "just know" He's going to bring up my past failures and lecture me. Yes, I know better than this, but it never sank in.
I don't remember church Sunday morning except that I know the choir sang some song about grace that was just the most beautiful song I ever heard. I don't need to remember now, though. It was just a continuation of Saturday night. It was just pure worship, one of the few times I have really experienced worship in my life.
I'm crying now--again. I cry over everything anyway, but I'm starting to realize there are different kinds of tears.
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