Excerpts From My 2018 Passion Planner Along With 2023 Reflections
2018 Wish List
- Increase water intake and time spent in the sun
- Sew something
- Go somewhere
- Finish degree
- Learn, grow, change
2023 Reflection
I’d had planners before and didn’t make such a big deal out of them as I did this time around. The reasoning behind it all was that I was unhappy with my life and needed a change. My job, at the time, made up the greatest bulk of my life, and I felt totally unfulfilled by it. In fact, throughout my planner, I complained about how much I hated my job and wanted to leave it and do something else. So, in some way, the planner became my motivation for pushing myself to finish grad school and find moments of peace in everyday life.
My overall goal at the time was to finish grad school so I could become a licensed professional counselor. I had a long way to go. I had practically bottomed out of the program. For a short term goal, I focused on increasing my water intake and getting more sun. I was borderline dehydrated with a low vitamin D count. I needed to go somewhere and had decided to plan a vacation later on in the year to some place foreign and sunny. When I thought I’d gain some free time from work, I’d embark on sewing something and learning, growing, and changing. All of this became my focus for the year.
Friday, January 14, 2018
The word of the day is entrenched which means firmly established and difficult or unlikely to change; ingrained. It also means to place oneself in a strong defensive position.
2023 Reflection
I was dealing with a frenemy narcissist at the time, and I was clear that this frenemy was indeed a narcissist. I call this narcissist the Identity Thief. I was also dealing with two other people I was sure were narcissists too, but I was still trying to figure them out. This was also during the time that I was about to lose out on some money from the second of the three narcissists I called the Professional Gaslighting Narcissist (PGN).
In terms of the frenemy narcissist called the Identity Thief, I was finding it difficult to cut myself away from them at the time. Even though their constant narcissistic behaviors were wearing me down, I felt obligated to them out of some type of kinship. This narcissist had become so entrenched within my life that they were stealing elements of my identity and attempting to showcase those elements as parts of themselves to others.
I saw this stealing of my identity become more apparent when I saw the Identity Thief’s social media posts. They literally copied every move I made and then discussed it as if they were the original creator of my ideas and my life story. By the time I’d purchased the planner, their copycat ways has cooled down a little, and they were on the warpath against me with attacks to my character.
I had already gone through the maddening effect of the Identity Thief’s cycle of narcissistic abuse so much that I had dissociated within myself to a point that I had begun creating distance between myself and them. Like all the other narcissistic characters around me at the time, the Identity Thief drained me. However, I didn’t make the connection that every time I wrote down how tired I was in my planner that it had anything to do with my associates. But those associates were literally draining me of my life source.
Thursday, February 8, 2018
“Like a maniac shooting flaming arrows of death is one who deceives their neighbor and says, “I was only joking!” (Proverbs 26:18-19) In other words, there’s a little truth in every joke. It’s only a joke if we are both laughing.
2023 Reflection
I hate insults disguised as jokes. The narcissist I dubbed as the PGN did this all the time. It annoyed me so much that I would see them at work from a distance and purposefully avoid them. Outside of work, their insults were less jokes and more undercutting jabs.
They loved making jokes about me around others as a way to somehow upstage me and catch me off guard. The PGN seemed to enjoy trying to get a reaction out of me. Instead, I would choose not to react, glare back at them as they glared at me, say something funny and then walk away.
Week of March 18-24, 2018 – Personal To-Do-List
Wow! I viewed the video sent to me by NARC. Just when I thought I was free from drama! No chance of that!
The video sent to me was nothing more than subtle propaganda against me and against where I stand regarding my beliefs.
I have a horrible feeling in the pit of my being. So this video was meant to be an attack under the cunning ruse of, as she put it, “a need to understand me”.
The NARC is a bitch! She knows exactly what she’s doing, but she’s pretending like she’s so concerned about me. Yeah right! Who gets mad about someone else’s ancestry? That’s crazy!
2023 Reflection
In the above excerpt, the NARC was none other than the Identity Thief. They had the ability to really get to me. They were so cunning and derisive in their methods to manipulate. This was perhaps the most lethal, covert narcissist I’d ever met who wasn’t my mother.
During this time in my life, I had previously embarked upon self-discovery regarding my ancestry that had taken me years of research. For reasons that weren’t specifically made clear to me by the Identity Thief, they weren’t happy about my discovery at all. In fact, they raged over my discovery and kept me in their devaluation phase of narcissistic abuse for a long, long time.
For months after my discovery, the Identity Thief would send me articles, videos, and scriptures to negate my ancestry all while claiming to show concern. It was strange, and I didn’t see why it bothered them so much. Even when I was silent about the information I was learning, the Identity Thief would gaslight me into making sure I wouldn’t talk about it, or they’d goad me into an argument about it.
I didn’t get it or the Identity Thief’s overall anguish over my ancestry. I thought their reaction was a bit over the top, but I eventually stopped saying anything at all around them. Despite my silence, they couldn’t let it go. They’d take every opportunity to send me information designed specifically to showcase their point of view about it without verbally telling me their point of view. It was as if they hoped that I would react so that I could initiate a discussion. I would not react though.
I thought it was strange because the Identity Thief sure didn’t mind ever sharing facts about their own ancestry. Yet, any time I shared information I’d learned about mine, they’d be livid and would do everything possible to show my ancestry in a bad light or do whatever they could to make me upset. At some point, I stopped responding to any of this narcissist’s queries about my ancestry until they one day decided to “support” me on it.
April 2018 Monthly Passion Planner Reflection – What was the most memorable part of this past month? Describe it.
The most memorable part of this past month was writing about the past trauma I suffered as a child. This writing was a part of a class assignment. It was memorable because outside of a therapist that blew me off about the topic, I have never shared my story with anyone. It was also memorable because the professor for the class responded with compassion (even though I didn’t completely follow the assignment instructions). I realized that I had exposed a private piece of my heart. It was freeing and healing. The professor encouraged me to begin a blog and write book. She actually commented that I’m a good writer.
2023 Reflection
That graduate class assignment was the start to my journey of healing from the rape I endured when I was 9. It was the start of a flood of memories that my brain had protected me from by only allowing pieces of puzzle-like flashbacks to trigger my thought. All I had was my body that reacted and behaved abnormally by keeping a scorecard for all the trauma. Nonetheless, that class assignment was the start of my journey of unmasking terrible secrets harbored within my family as well, and it was a journey of understanding my place as the family’s scapegoat.
Of all the things that occurred that year regarding what I’d written in my planner, this assignment was the catalyst to bringing me to where I am today. It was the absolute first time I was able to utter the words that I had been raped. Despite recognizing and knowing the violation that was done to me, I was never able to verbalize it. So that assignment indicated that I was breaking through in a way that I hadn’t before.
I am still healing, and my heart is a lot less shattered than before. I don’t even know how so many tiny pieces of my heart could have even been salvaged from my brokenness, but I feel the mending of it. At times I feel the healing. My heart feels a lot less cynical and hardened than before – more pliable and a lot softer. I no longer feel or harbor hatred or malicious rage over what I couldn’t control, and I no longer feel animosity at the world. That fuel for hatred is gone, and that blaze has been extinguished.
I have allowed myself to cry lots and lots of tears. Although there are still elements of that traumatic experience that I still recoil from in thought, while some triggers still affect me, I feel better and I don’t harbor as much anger and bitterness as I once did about the situation. Those negative feelings continue to fade away. In other words, I no longer feel as if my body is entrapped by those traumatic events and keeping much score. Healing has been over time, and that has been good for me. I now have peace.
A Blast From The Past
The excerpts above were all chosen at random. I wanted to give the gist of just how random my days were in terms of a planning schedule. I wrote down a lot of what came to mind regarding the events of my life at the time in terms of what was happening, what I was thinking, and how others around me were behaving towards me. That planner is a huge 11 x 8 inch book. So I could write a lot, and write a lot is what I did.
Stay tuned for the next post.
My Voice Unchained 