#452 I Want to Go Home

I figured out why I hesitated to post this topic (see previous entry).

Because it's revealing.

Several strangers who have somehow found my journal (particularly the earlier entries on AOL, when I was trying to finally let go of Jay) have commented that reading my journal has changed them, that they'd never seen feelings so starkly and yet so deeply expressed (which is one reason that I didn't allow comments - the comments themselves were sometimes wrenching), and so on. They almost all comment on the degree of self-revelation in so many entries, particularly those concerning Jay's and my relationship. Several have told me that my memorial to Jay made them cry. Complete strangers. And yet I continue.

Family and friends are not surprised. They know that I will say whatever I think and feel without censor or censure. My thoughts and emotions are very close to the surface. If they are even the least bit hidden, I drag them out to look at them. Take it or leave it, it's me. It's at least honest.

After what Daughter told me on Thanksgiving Day, I wanted to hide for a while. But that's the whole point of this topic - not hiding. It's the whole point of the journal, actually. Not hiding.

So here it is:

"I want to go home."

After I graduated from college, when I was finally out on my own, I think I may have been a little ... um ... mentally ill. Actually, maybe a little more than a little. I'd be in my kitchen, washing dishes, and I'd hear a voice, someone calling my name. It was so clear I'd turn around, thinking someone was in the hall calling me. Sometimes it was my mother's voice. Sometimes it was a stranger's voice. It was never my own inside-my-head-thinking voice.

The voice called me several times a week, always when I was alone. Sometimes the voice woke me from a sound sleep, calling me. Never anything but my name, and not even my full name, just the first half. The tone wasn't like my mother calling me home, but more like someone tapping me on the shoulder, saying my name to get my attention. It always made me look up, look around. It was so outside me.

Also, every once in a while, while I was doing some household chore, I'd stop, and look out a window, and I'd think to myself, "I want to go home." It was a sad thought. I didn't know why I said it. I didn't know what it meant. I was home. I often said it out loud. I surprised myself when I thought or said it, because I hadn't been thinking it, didn't know why I said it, and with such intense longing.

I had the "calling" voice and the "home" thought through my twenties and until my mid-thirties. The "calling" voice gradually came less often, as the wanting to "go home" increased. By my mid-thirties, I was walking around thinking "I want to go home" almost constantly. Everywhere. All the time. I wanted to go home so badly I sometimes burst into tears, but I couldn't figure out where home was. It certainly had nothing to do with my parents.

By then I was in psychotherapy. I told Dr. K. about how I thought "I want to go home" all the time, and how badly I wanted to go home, and he asked what I thought it meant, and I said I didn't know. He was sure it was not suicide. I wasn't so sure.

At the end of four plus years of therapy, I realized that if I stayed in the marriage to Ex#2, I would die inside. Worse, I could see six-year-old Daughter trying to get his attention, and her failure was making her sad, too. I was finally emotionally strong enough to take care of myself and her. We left him.

"I want to go home" slowed to a trickle almost immediately after leaving him. I haven't thought or heard it in almost twenty years.

Now I am content. I now finally know what I wanted. I know where "home" is.

Home is me.

Because of the way I was brought up, and because the early conditioning was reinforced by some emotional battery in college, I had believed that everything that went wrong was my fault. I thought I didn't matter. That it was up to me to make everyone happy. To be what they wanted me to be, to do what they wanted me to do, to fulfill their definition of me, their expectations. To give what others wanted, no matter what I wanted. Because I didn't matter. I didn't matter. I wasn't important.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost me. I didn't know who I was, or what or how I was. "I" was gone.

I guess that's what Dr. K. meant when he said I had a "poorly integrated personality".

It was only after I left Ex#2, and Daughter was the only person I had to be responsible to and for, that I was finally able to find me. And thanks to Dr. K., I found I liked me. It took a long time to get comfortable with me, to find out that I do matter, and that it's ok to define myself. To be myself. Eventually I liked me. A lot. I'm pretty nice, actually. I wish I had known me when I was younger.

I am valuable. I know who I am, what I am, and what I have to offer. I have faults and failings (one being a tendency toward self-involvement, no surprise, another a resistance to being responsible to anyone else, also no surprise), but they're minor compared to all of the good of the rest of me, and I admit to my faults freely. They are part of the package that is me. I am me, and I like me.

I am finally home. I am at home in myself, and I am content.

The reason I hesitated to post this is that on the way home from Reading yesterday afternoon, as I was driving through the mountains, I thought, "I want to go home." Just once, but it scared me. I think it was because of Daughter's revelation that she had contacted someone from "back then". Someone who knew me before I was me.

It frightened me. The thought, not the contact.

I'm ok now. All I have to do is be me, and everything will be ok.

~~Silk