It Takes Energy To Tell My Story

It Takes Energy To Tell My Story

When I first started this blog, I had no idea what I was in for at all. I had never blogged before. I had only journaled my thoughts and the events of my life as if writing in a diary. I considered my thoughts and the events of my life as a way to communicate with God. My thoughts about my life were secrets that I kept guarded away from others, but I figured that since God created me and is said to have seen the days of the my life before I even lived them, then He alone would know what was going on with me, would understand, and would sincerely listen to my heart and all the mundane things about my days when no one else would hear me.

For the most part, I did not truly begin to understand the benefits of keeping a journal until I would read back over my writings. I could see so much about myself that I liked and did not like. I made great efforts to improve myself. Over time, I could see my growth, progress, and change, but I could also see my setbacks. I could see answers to many of my questions about personal situations that I was dealing with, and I could see so many problems that I worked through which was often more than I worked through when I attended and participated in therapy.

I also saw my spiritual life evolve over time. My prayer life grew as well as my spiritual connection to God. When I did not journal, that often signified the fact that I had grown distant from attending to my spiritual needs or that I had grown distant towards God because of my own behaviors. Often times, my lack of journal time also indicated that I had become super busy in my professional and personal life too. Then there was the battle with depression as well. When I was deeply struggling with depressive episodes, I would neglect journaling for days, weeks, and months at a time. Sometimes I might have just enough energy to open my journal and express that at least I was alive.

For the most part, my journal was my way to release my thoughts, my ideas, my passions, my fears, my hurts, my losses, and my wins. So much about my internal conflicts can be found inside my journals. {I have several.} My struggles with resentment, unforgiveness, bitterness, and all other types of negative emotions are all expressed within my journals. In fact, the very core of who I am is the only place that I am completely known and not judged for who I am can all be found in my journals. All of my battles can be found in my journals. The descriptions of my struggles are far more detailed in my journals than what I choose to bare in my blog because those details occur within the moment.

Three major topics that ring throughout my journals all fall under the mental health umbrella: depression, anxiety, and personality disorders. My journal is filled with basically all of my struggles concerning how I have coped with depression and anxiety and how I am surviving narcissistic abuse. I have created massive amounts of data as content – compartmentalized, saved, and housed on floppy disks, flash drives, and hard drives over the years. In many ways, I have already written volumes of books. Some of those volumes have been painfully lost because the data could not be transferred over into newer forms of technological devices – mainly because I did not know how to do so.

Journaling Vs. Blogging

I am finding, however, that journaling my story is vastly different than blogging my story. Blogging requires that I share intimate details of my life with a live audience. Unless I specifically see a list, I do not always know who chooses to read my content. With my journal, the words I speak are just between me and God. With my blog, I become an open book with what I choose to share. In many ways, I unveil bits and pieces of myself, and it is not easy to do because there is often the flash of thought that I will be judged harshly regarding the choices I have made in my life.

Yet, more pressing than anything is the time it takes for me to share my experiences. Anyone who has suffered from narcissistic abuse knows that the abuse leaves a trail of devastation in its path. Working through my past experiences in this blog has been no easy task. Sometimes my words just flow in telling my story, but more often, I struggle with reliving the past that I experienced with narcissists, flying monkeys, and other toxic associates. Sometimes I have to stop cold while blogging because of the emotions that come up to the surface, and other times I am amazed at how fast a story comes out of me. Those are the times that an entire saga seems to come out of me and I can blog gobs of content without hindrance.

With journaling, I can say whatever I want to say and however I want to say it. I do not ever consider context, proper grammar, or any other correct sentence structure or semantics. I just express myself and go on the assumption that God already knows what I am going to share before I even think it or express it. It is in no way like this with blogging. With blogging, I cannot ever assume that readers know what I am talking about or trying to convey. Despite always trying to make my writing both readable and understandable, I know that sometimes my writing simply does not always flow. I also know that despite my attempts to get sentence structure just right and make sure I use correct grammar, my editing still needs a lot of work. I go back and read my writings after I publish them to find that I need to make a lot of corrections.

To be honest, sometimes all I can do is simply push through a story because I have spent such an enormous amount of time simply trying to share it. It can be exhausting to relive parts of my life that I simply want to keep behind me. Each time I express a story, I am often surprised by how much I am triggered by certain emotions. Frankly, it can be extremely exhausting to the point that I push my self through it, often becoming stuck – not able to finish the story until I rest to rebuild my energy. My mind will literally pause in the moment, and I experience what feels like a disconnect so that I cannot move further in sharing the story.

It requires a lot of energy to retell my story when I am not looking for insight. This is where blogging is completely different from journaling. I journal for insight because my life is happening in the moment, but I blog hoping to give insight because the events I now describe have already happened to me. The exhaustion I sometimes feel after I blog often leaves me with gaps and lapses in time regarding stories that I share. Any story that has more than one part will often not be released in a timely fashion depending on the narcissist who happens to be the topic of discussion.

For instance, I felt like it took forever to tell my story about Mr. Charm. In the beginning, everything seemed to flow right out of me up until near the end. It was at that point that I felt like I had no more energy to give to him. So I stopped. I did not really consider that readers would be invested in what happened, and a comment was all I needed as my motivation to finish it. I was grateful for that comment because pushing through that story exhausted me. Yet, telling his story was a far easier task than talking about The Most Wonderful Narc Of Them All. In fact, I cut that story short and even forgot to publish some parts.

Sometimes, I have no choice but to take a break from blogging because I realize that I still need to reflect and heal. Sometimes I become overwhelmed with various emotions that arise to the surface, and I just have to sit back and take a deep breath. Sometimes I reflect to see that I still have negative traits of my own to work through. Other times I realize that the narcissist that I am discussing is truly a layered character, and there is far more to my experience with them that I did not even realize in the moments of blogging. In those moments I have a rude awakening that a simple retelling of the story is not really that simple at all.

Blogging Has Been A Great Experience

Overall, though, blogging has been both cathartic and healing for me. Plus, the more I share, the more I come to find that my experiences align with the experiences of so many others who are living through and surviving narcissistic abuse. It feels good to know that I am not alone and that my experiences are not so far-fetched … that narcissists actually do bring with them a lot of drama to the lives of their targets. Journaling has always been a closed experience for me, but now I am sharing my story with others. I am unchaining my voice to speak and share my stories with others, but it does take energy to tell my story. As a victim and now survivor of narcissistic abuse, my energy is sometimes limited, but I assure you that there are more stories to come.