Johnny Boy Marketing

It was the afternoon of Sept. 26, 2015, and I’d just returned home from a short stay in a psychiatric hospital. The pace of life in a psychiatric hospital is glacial. Days stretch on endlessly, nights pass in medicated dreamlessness, and the cycle repeats again.

There’s horrible food, group sessions, recreation time outside when it’s extremely evident how high the fences are and how not-free you are to just wander away. No one forces you to do anything. Eat. Recreate. Talk to anyone. Go to the group sessions. You do you, my brother or sister.

There’s medications and evaluations, but no shoe strings or belts or hard-cover books. You can have the ink stick part of a pen, but that’s it. There’s visiting hours, but physical contact is forbidden, for the most part, and there’s at least one staff member posted in the room. It’s not exactly the best time to delve deeply with your wife into how the hell your life ended up like this.

No one really wants to be there, even those who, like me, know it’s the best place for them at the moment.

I was happy to be out on that September day, but I was far from happy. I was broken.

The real world is so much faster than life in a psychiatric ward. Louder. Everything is turned up to 11.

Less than 15 minutes after getting home, I needed to get away, so I went upstairs and took a long bath. Psychiatric facilities have showers, but depending on whom you end up with as a roommate, it’s not necessarily the place you want to be. Mine liked to shit in the shower, so yeah, I needed a bath.

After a half-hour of soaking, I felt something closer to human, and I started to get ready to go back downstairs and face the house full of well-wishers whom I’d worried so badly. And for whatever reason, I remembered I had a blank journal. It’s brown, leather, embossed with Jeremiah 29:11 … “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord. “Plans to prosper you & not harm you, plans to give you hope & a future.”

So I did what I hadn’t done in about five years … I started to journal my thoughts.

I received my first journal when I was in sixth grade. It was from a family friend who knew I was going through a tough time. My childhood friends had decided en masse that I was no longer good enough to hang out with. I was in a new school — our middle school combined the elementaries of various towns — with no friends and a lot of insecurity. This family friend thought I’d benefit from getting my feelings out on paper.

The journal fit well with the times. Star Wars was all the rage. This journal’s cover read “My Jedi Journal.” Into it I spilled my feelings of anger at my former friends … and then gradually my thoughts on other topics. Girls. School. My parents.

I’d journaled on and off since that time, but I fell away from it somewhere after the turn of the decade. Me not journaling is never a good thing. I have always been a big feeler, and I learned the hard way that it’s a must for me to get those feelings out. If I don’t put them on paper, they’re likely going to come out in a much less healthy way.

On that September afternoon, I wrote about where I’d just been. The entry is short. I was tired. “I feel very … fragile,” I wrote. “There’s a lot of ‘scared.’ But I am taking deep comfort in the love of my wife.”

And then I concluded it by writing, “A new journey awaits.”

Tonight, for reasons I am not quite sure of, I was struck by the need to assemble all my journals and put them in some sort of chronological order. It’s an itch I’ve been meaning to scratch for a while. Like many significant things in my life, that itch just got stronger until not doing it wasn’t an option. So I did it.

That first journal, which was filled with the events, thoughts and feelings of just two short months, was followed by 15 others in a nearly constant stream of emotion.

Sixteen journals chronicling more than seven ugly years.

Despite what I wrote on Page 1 of Journal 1, I had no sense of what this journey would be. I had no idea that it would be this long, this painful, this difficult. All I knew was that I was broken and three days removed from nearly being dead. That hope expressed in the whole “A new journey awaits” thing was soon followed by a whole lot of brokenness and dysfunction. Flipping through the pages of the subsequent 15 journals, the ugly outweighs the good at least 15-to-1. Yes, there are highs. But my God are there an awful lot of lows.

You’ve likely heard the phrase “How the sausage gets made.” It’s used as a metaphor for something that is unsavory or unpleasant. My journals take that sausage-making to a new level.

Sitting here in the newly started year of 2023, I can see that. I can see that ugliness for what it is — healing.

But as I was writing it? The emotions are raw and often very, very ugly. The actions those pages chronical sometimes seem as if they were taken by a stranger, not the person I’ve stared at in the mirror for more than 48 years. The beliefs and thoughts are frequently so warped from the me who I don’t mind looking at in that mirror today.

If you look carefully at those pages, you can see a trend line toward a healthier me, but if you get lost in the individual entries? Absolutely not. You see someone saying horrible things about people who love him, doing things he at one point never would have considered doing. Zoom out, though, and you see the process.

Healing is ugly. I don’t know why I once thought it wasn’t. Having gone through what those 16 journals document shows me just how foolish it was to think that healing just sort of happens, like when you cut your finger or skin your knee. This type of healing was brutal. It was messy. It was destructive. It was hard.

The whole concept of journaling is interesting. We put down our innermost thoughts, expecting no one will read them while we’re alive, knowing that, at some point, we’re all going to die and leave behind this record for someone we love to figure out what to do with. I recognize I’m doing that to my loved ones … my wife, my boys … someone who will be Here when I am There. Do I really want anyone, especially those whom I love the most, to read that ugly sausage-making experience? Hell no. Especially not if they don’t have that zoom-out ability to see them for what they are.

Yet the thought of pitching them, burning them, burying them … it makes me recoil. That would be like pitching, burning or burying me.

I made that mistake once. My Jedi Journal and the ones that marked my childhood went up in smoke in a firepit in the backyard of our Minnesota home right before we moved to Missourah. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to have that stuff following me to this new start in a new state working in a new industry.

I was stupid. I wish I had those journals now.

Sixteen journals. A 17th is already in the works. I started it just after the new year. The tone, the words, the thoughts, the feelings … it’s so much different from that first one. But there are some similarities. I still feel big. I still need to journal — to make the sausage — to get through the difficult times and arrive at the right place at the right time. Even now, there are things in those pages that, unless you have the zoom-out mentality, could be seen as hurtful or mean or bad.

I own those thoughts and feelings. Evidently, they’re a necessary part of me being me. Nothing about me comes easy. It hasn’t since that first entry on that first page in that first journal. No, it doesn’t come easy. But what those pages show is that, eventually, it comes.

The thing I am most proud of when I read those pages is that I never stopped trying. I never gave up. I was always willing to do the next hard thing, whether that was with my brain health, my career, my marriage, my boys, my physical health, my humanity. I have grown so, so much since that first entry. And I did that by refusing to stay down, no matter how many times life (or, more accurately, my own actions) knocked me flat on my back.

I’m proud of myself. I did that. I didn’t give up. I kept going. Crazy old big-feeling John. I did that.

The 16 journals are now in a drawer, arranged earliest to latest. They’ll be joined by others as I finish them. I’m not going to stop writing unless that same thing that nudged me to start doing so, for some reason, leaves. I have no clue what the point of all that writing is for anyone else, but for me? It’s kept me alive, yes.

And it shows me just how far I’ve come.

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