Look out! That’s not what you think it is. He’s gaslighting you. I know exactly what this all means, where it’s leading to, and what you should be doing. You are so much stronger, optimistic, and resilient than I remember. I’m sorry you have to trudge through this muddy, dark bog – green fields filled with wildflowers, peace, and joy are on the other side, I promise. I wish you could hear me.

I have been reliving past lives this week and it’s been a roller coaster. I am not taking this Back to the Future ride completely alone. I have included my current husband in some parts of the ride and my youngest daughter for other parts of the ride. It’s been a surreal experience filled with thrills, spills, warnings to my past self, and many revelations. And I know there is a lot to come.

This dive into my past is research for a book I’m writing. My book includes stories from my life and as much as I tried to avoid it, I recently came to the realization that I could not move forward without reading through my diaries from the past 26 years. That’s a lot of days and a lot of thoughts. The minutiae of meals, activities, work, and daily life as a young mom of 3 young kids is interwoven with the celebration of parenting, family, and laughter.

However, It’s also threaded with the dysfunction, exhaustion, and endless search for clarity and reset buttons that come with living with a spouse with addictions and children with mental health issues. I am inspired by the boundless energy, focus on gratitude, and desire to try coping strategies that my younger self had.

As I read, I think and talk about my younger self in the third person. She is her own being. She is a dynamo with an endless well of energy. She tries so hard to make sense of the mental illness that surrounds her. I often find myself talking to her out loud, explaining what I now know that person’s behavior meant. When she writes,”I truly hope that we can now move forward from here,” both my (now 23 year old) daughter and I feel badly having to let her know that the day she is yearning for has not yet arrived. Not in the beginning of 2011, at least. But we see her eyes opening a lot and we know that she is about to make some really hard, important, life-saving decisions.

I resisted reading back through these times for years. I tried it briefly a while ago, out of curiosity, and was immediately slammed by my emotions around experiences I had gratefully forgotten. I became too upset and uncomfortable and decided that the past was best left in the past. I was lucky to be able to live my current, happy life without having to remember every step that got me here. But this book is all about how I’ve arrived where I am, as I share my successes with others who may need to reset – so I don’t have the luxury anymore of blissful forgetfulness.

A few days ago I gritted my teeth and opened up the first diary. It started on October 15, 1998. As I read I found myself sinking into a feeling of despair that is not at all my usual feeling. I explained a little to my current husband and he offered to be with me as I read through it. I wondered if that was a healthy or unhealthy idea. He met me almost 20 years later. I was a different person living a different life. Maybe it’s a really bad idea for him to get to know who I was and what life was like for me with a different husband. I was nervous to chance him seeing something he could not unsee. Maybe there is a reason that we met each other after learning so many lessons from past experiences and have moved on together from there. But I really couldn’t stomach continuing to read this diary alone so I accepted his offer. We read through the 1st two years together. I appreciate what a loving partner I now have, accepting his hug and offer for a walk to debrief and process, after we were done reading.

And then I read the next few years by myself. Because this is really my journey and he doesn’t have to sit with me in the trenches of a battle he never waged. Luckily those next few years were easier and fortified me to carry on. I’ve seen this movie before so I know that the real challenges still lie ahead.

Yesterday, as I resumed my reading in the next 5-year diary, I started encountering some of those challenges. Once again I wondered if it was worth it to continue this exercise. My daughter, this time, offered to listen to what I was reading. She was quite young during these early diary years and recalls very little about our family’s life from that time. She and I read for hours last night and it was actually a joy to do so. We stopped often when she had a question or could flesh out the memory even further. We laughed and had meaningful conversations. She could give a bit of the kids’ perception and it gave her context into why she and her siblings are who they are today.

We were sad to stop reading when we got too tired and compared it to a Netflix series that keeps you wanting more. So this morning, as we travelled to a Medical School Acceptance Day, she drove and I continued reading. As she got to know the Me of so many years ago, she had a really interesting revelation.

She said that she “met” me after the largest challenges had passed, when we were already moving forward into our healthier future. “I grew up sheltered from the hardest times and lived in the healing part of the journey,” she tells me. She doesn’t know the woman in the diary who is not yet an expert at handling difficult times. She doesn’t remember meeting the woman in the diary who is confused and coming up with as many plausible reasons as she can to explain her husband or sons’ erratic behaviors.

She grew up as the Israelite in the desert – not the slave in Egypt. We were not yet in the Promised Land but we were already on the journey and together had made it through many obstacles. She tells me her mother was not naive or innocent, as the young woman in the diary seems to be. Her mother has always been seasoned. She always grew up comfortable talking about drugs, alcohol, addiction, and recovery. It wasn’t different, new, or taboo as it was for the young woman and her young family in the diary, who were learning about it for the first time.

I feel proud that I was able to shield my child from the hardest times. I feel grateful that it’s not a part of her history. I am curious what new revelations she has. I am writing this as she is enjoying her Acceptance Day and I look forward to hearing more of her thoughts as we continue reading the diary on the ride home. We did get a glimpse into new thought processes that this young woman was starting to explore and we are cheering for her. We are eager to re-experience her next year, supporting her silently from the future, as she takes the first important steps to creating the future she always deserved.