Normal

Today I was packing stuff to store while I'm on my long visit home and I opened a journal and got sucked in. What I found in my entries of the summer of 2004 made me realize (thankfully!) how much I've grown in the last 7 years since I realized my life didn't work and if I didn't do something about that it would continue to not work until there was no more not-working to be done. It was a good two-year season focused on understanding my self-protective coping mechanisms, un-learning destructive emotional habits and re-learning how to cope with life in healthy and appropriate ways.

The most amusing thing I came across was this journal excerpt:

"Pride is a no-brainer. I know how it feels and how I respond. The shame it's covering is that all my 'hard work' for the past year plus has gotten me to where I do almost what normal people do. How can I boast in that? What's to say? 'Wahoo! I'm almost to the bottom of normal!'?"

Good stuff. Thank God I can actually laugh about it now. At the time I wrote that I would never have imagined I'd look back through that journal and laugh. Normal is a beautiful thing.

In the same folder I also found something I wrote down 1n 1994 which I found rather inspiring, especially after seeing all the reflections of the angst of my hard-earned growth and change. It said "When it seems impossible to go forward, look back at what God has brought you through."

Amen to that!