I feel like I have a lot to say about personal experiences. The question is whether it should remain between myself and my journal or if I should package things more suitably for public consumption and share them with the world. Is there anyone that needs to hear what I have to say? Or is that a self-centered view that comes from living in the society I do, where social media gives each person a platform and a false sense of personal fame. I wonder if I will look back in a few years on my current reflections with the same embarrassment I feel now looking back five or more years.
There is the matter of growing up in a fundamentalist Christian community. I could say so much about being homeschooled, using Sonlight curriculum, having church and Christian homeschool groups as my only socialization. I could talk about the years my parents were on staff with YWAM and I lived on a missionary base. Attending Bible college at a Pentecostal charismatic school. Marriage just after graduation when I was far too young and inexperienced with life to be getting into that type of relationship. A post-graduation search for purpose and meaning as the more education I received, the more my faith fell apart. I could tell people about my personal journey into healing from purity culture and discovering my own sexual identity and the ways it contributed to the end of my marriage.
If I talked about all that, it would be colored through the lens of my mental health experience. That is to say that my own perspective on my life influences how I process my experience and my perspective has been shaped by depression and other ongoing mental health disorders. I could talk about the good along with the bad. There certainly has been plenty of good in my life, it has simply been tainted by a struggle with mental illness and unaccepted neurodivergence. The struggle culminated in a breakdown. All the moments of my life one after the other built up to a climax that nearly brought the story to an end. Certainly a dramatic way of framing the fact that I ended up in the mental hospital during an acute depressive episode that triggered intense suicidal ideation.
I think I’ve been looking at it wrong though, my breakdown. Seeing my life as a story with the regular dramatic arc puts my breakdown at the climax. There was a moment where death seemed the only possibility, where I thought the story would end with a funeral. And then I made a choice: to drive to the hospital instead of driving home. A climax, a choice, a week of anguish, a release into life as a (barely) stable member of society. But that would frame the last few months of my life as the resolution to the story. It works if I’m writing a memoir of my young adulthood. But as a framework for understanding my life, it holds me back in ways I hadn’t quite realized. I’ve been getting through the last few months as if the story has ended. The mentality feels similar to how I think of characters at the end of cheesy romance novels. The plot points have all resolved and the characters continue on as vaguely happy creatures that float through time without anything really happening. I feel like I have to start a new story and it has me frozen with fear. Part of me is apprehensive that I might end up at another breakdown. Rather than living and choosing to have experiences that bring me fulfillment and happiness, I feel like I have to choose what my new story will be and then mold my world and experiences around that.
As I reframe my way of understanding my own life, I find that I am able to experience more fulfillment. The “story mindset,” as I call it, served me well for a time. As a young adult attempting to create an identity and live with purpose, seeing myself within a story gave meaning to things in my life. At this point, I find that creating a new story is less important to me than being myself. For instance my career is not exactly fulfilling or exciting. I’d like to be doing something more meaningful. But at the moment I am okay with waiting to make a big change because I have to make a lot of small choices every day about who I am and who I want to be. I am trying not to worry about what plot points I am creating in my story, whether I am delaying an important moment or perhaps creating a twist that ends in another climax like my choice to hospitalize myself. Hopefully this reframing is helpful for me. Looking at choices and asking “will this bring personal fulfillment right now,” and “will this bring personal fulfillment in the future” instead of asking how it fits in the story is a lot less pressure for now. (A side note about framing my life in terms of personal fulfillment. I realize that on the surface it can sound entirely selfish. But personal fulfillment, to me, is about living one’s values. If I did not value the happiness and wellbeing of others, then seeking my own fulfillment would likely be selfish. But that is not the case here.)
Perhaps I will eventually find motivation to expand on the different points of my personal experience. But I am hesitant to say anything that might hurt the people in my life and sharing my story from my current perspective which is of the pain and difficult things I have experienced will likely do that. For now I have tried to remain vague enough about things beyond my inner experience to avoid offense. Maybe this is a reflection that will add value to others as well as myself. For now I will leave it here where people can find it but likely won’t.
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