Becoming the Unreliable Narrator

How Lying to my Journal Saved My Life and Ended My Relationship.

Entry 1:

I’ve kept a journal most of my life. Its contents have always been an uncharted expanse of my subconscious mind: streams of consciousness, deep dark secrets, to-do lists, hour-by-hour recaps of my day, or, as pictured in this entry from 2003, a booby-trap checklist with my 7-year-old enemies categorized by relevancy. Each page always seemed to reveal itself to me, as if the words had always been there, already printed on the page. My curling cursive spilled from my pen like blackout drunken words during last call at the coziest of bars. Always safely tucked into bed as I would write. To this day, I often wake up with ink stains on my fingers, transferred to my sheets and pressed into the pale skin of my thighs and cheeks from the night before. My journal waiting bedside for me to share more come morning. Looking back at my entries, time stamps are unnecessary, I am always painfully aware of what was written under the darkness of night or the new perspective of morning’s light.

Pictured: Journal entry from 2003 (allow me to decode this for you). Weapons, walkie-talkie, a good place, ???, secret, camouflage, booby trap, string or a rope, enemies. I’ve redacted the list of my enemies so I can sleep at night.

Like so many women, writing has always been a comforting escape from reality. Though I have always felt that the escapism of writing has only ever made my reality clearer, a place to have a conversation with the only person I have ever truly trusted: myself. Even then, there are many days when I don’t even trust her. My journal holds the type of inside thoughts that would surely have me committed by someone who couldn’t understand the inner workings of my metaphorical mind. Just the other week, before going on a date with a stranger from a dating app, I texted my friend Sara: “If I die, please burn my red journal and erase the notes app on my phone.” With this in mind, I have always kept my journal entries under lock and key.

The pages from my adolescence are held with less regard, kept in an undisclosed location inside my apartment but accessible without a passcode. I can look back on even the most heinous or bewildering entries with the amusement and laughter that time has allowed me. I was crazy because I was a kid. More recent entries are both treasured and hidden under the shrouded secrecy of a vintage wooden box, accessible with a singular key that I keep safely hidden in a false drawer, or at least that’s what I’m telling you to keep the key’s true location a secret that I hold only within the walls of my mind. In that box are three black journals that can only be opened with the spinning silver passcode dials that bind their leather covers. Those pages hold both the truth and the unreliable narration of a three-year span of time within a nearly decade-long relationship.

Pictured: My text to Sara. He didn’t kill me but he also wasn’t my future husband. (You win some. You lose some.)

I love rereading my journal entries. Reflecting on my past has always brought me great joy. Being able to connect the dots and decode my inner knowings feels like time travel. I’ve had the pleasure of watching my inner child grow up as an adult by rereading the pages penned by her mind. I may not be able to remember everything that’s ever happened to me, but for a good majority of my life, I have a detailed chronicle of how I felt, until I reach the lined pages that inhabit the bindings of the black leather-locked journals. It is there that the narration of my life becomes unreliable.

Looking back at these feels like reading a playbook on how to conduct emotional warfare. Not the light-hearted childhood jests of booby traps found in a 7-year-old’s journal, but the systematic breakdown of a young woman’s sense of self, confidence, and trust in the world around her. I’ve been revisiting the pages of these journals over the past year as research for a personal project. Doing so has taken me on a roller coaster of emotions. Waves of anger flood through my body like a heatwave baking me from the inside out. How could I be so naive? I’ve asked myself this many times while flipping through the pages, all of which are stained with tears from both then and now. As the journals progress and my sense of self and confidence seem to run dry like the varying shades of ink, it becomes clear that I am no longer writing about myself but to myself. I begin convincing myself that I am the problem. I plead with myself to leave and convince myself to stay. I write about how in love I am, in an attempt to justify what was really happening behind the closed doors of our home, as if willing my reality to transmute into the written manifestation of what I thought we could be.

Between some of the darkest days of my life were hidden pockets of carefully crafted light. These pages illuminated my capacity to look past my own grief and still find the immeasurable power and beauty of love. I would craft false, opalescent daydreams of destined love in the form of poems, songs, and unreachable goals. Through the lens of my delusional daydreams, our love could survive anything. The truth was, as I eventually found out, my love could survive anything— but we could not survive him.

I remember when I began leaving out the details of my day. I had been flipping through the pages to try and find a short poem I had written the week before. I noticed that eight pages in a row started as follows:

1. “We got in another huge fight last night. I haven’t been able to stop crying.”

2. “I don’t know how I can keep going like this.”

3. “I can’t take it anymore.”

4. “I’m in so much pain why do I—”

5. “He lost it on me because—”

6. “I feel like a failure.”

7. “I’m hoping tomorrow will be better.”

8. “I hate feeling like this, why can’t I—”

Soon, I didn’t have the heart to chronicle the daily verbal tirades and tears. I lived in constant fear that my partner might read through my journal and become aware of my private thoughts. For the first time in years, there were gaps in my entries, spanning days and then weeks. I felt embarrassed, like the future version of myself would be ashamed that our love story stemmed from such dark roots. I believed that one day we would bloom into a beautiful flower and I hoped that if I didn’t write about it maybe she wouldn’t find out. I was haunted by visions of my future daughters turning through the pages of my journals to see how we had fallen in love—only to find that perhaps there was never love there. Instead, my spirit had been taken so low that I never again possessed the power it would take to climb the walls and leave.

The last page in that journal read, “I need to stop writing. I don’t think this is healthy for me.” I had decided that reliving every day in writing was not something I had the emotional capacity to do. Perhaps, somehow, if I didn’t write it, it wasn’t real.

Pictured: The last page of the final black leather locked journal.

A whole year passed by without me writing a single entry. I kept a running notebook of poems, short film concepts, lyrics, script synopses, random notes, and ideas, but never entries about how I was feeling or detailed accounts of what was happening in my day-to-day life. Occasionally, I would mention an important career moment, like booking a new show, or vague information about exciting life events. The notes app on my phone, however, housed the pleadings of a woman who had regressed back into a little girl. I allowed my emotions to spill out as digital dust on days when I felt like I would combust if I didn’t share how I felt with someone, even if that someone could only be me. My fingers could rarely keep up with my pain. Draft after draft, I fantasized about sending these novels and winning our wars with words.

I have a hard time admitting all of this because I don’t want to view myself or my life through the lens of a victim. During this time, I also achieved once-in-a-lifetime things. There were many happy moments—even stretches of time where my life felt like a dream. I received a world-class education in culture, history, the fine arts, business, and so much more. None of it, however, made up for the loss of losing myself.

One day, near the end of this chapter of my life, I decided to read through the pages of those old leather-locked journals. I wanted to be angry. I was tired of being sad or numb-I wanted to feel. With each page, the rage bubbled closer and closer to the surface. I was temporarily “sober,” meaning the straw that broke the camel’s back was allowing me to see everything for what it truly was, including the pages where I had begun to redact the truth. Those pages actually made me the angriest.

Even at my lowest, I acted from a place of love, wanting to protect the person I loved from being condemned for their own actions within the pages of my private journal. So instead, I condemned myself for having feelings of any kind. In one old entry, I wrote about how I was comforted by the fact that somewhere in another dimension or on another timeline, I was happy and in love with someone who treated me with the type of respect I had envisioned as a little girl. That version of myself was blissful and unaware, but the version of me that I was experiencing was meant to achieve great things. My sole purpose for existing was to achieve, achieve, achieve, something I had been convinced I could no longer do alone. I was brave, I was dedicated, and I had the strength to silently absorb everything that was happening to me, all in the name of achieving my destiny, which I apparently believed involved pushing through pain and living this way. I lived under a dark night for so long that when the switch flipped in my brain bringing me back into reality, it felt like I was entering a warped daydream. A light turned on, and I could not unsee what was around me—the toxic waste I had been marinating in for almost a decade. Once it was on, the light inside me could not be turned back off, no matter how hard they tried. I was finally DONE.

I never thought I’d get there. I never believed it was possible. My brain refused to wrap itself around a reality where I was not defined by this unlawful union. But then —on a very ordinary day, the extraordinary happened. I was no longer the brave girl pushing through the pain of my reality to achieve greatness. I was the girl in that “other dimension,” on that “other timeline”. I knew I would never go back. I had always gone back. Every time it ended, I knew it wasn’t over. Suddenly, in an instant, all of that changed.

I was happy. I was in love with life and myself again. I felt blissful and unaware of any timeline or dimension where this person could ever have any power over me again. In finding myself, I realized that this was the greatest accomplishment I would ever have—no matter what magic my future held. I had been to hell and back, and I didn’t allow it to change who I was or define who I am.

I titled this article ‘Becoming the Unreliable Narrator: How Lying to My Journal Saved My Life and Ended My Relationship’ because both are true. Finding the clarity and courage to leave gave me a second chance at life. Who I was born to be, who I know myself to be, and who I have yet to become all hung in the balance of the decision to walk away and never look back.

That time in my life often feels like a bad dream that never really happened. When I was in it, I always worried that if I ever left, it would define the rest of my life. I’m happy to report to anyone who may be feeling the same way right now that it barely registers as a seismic event. Of course, there are days when it consumes me and swallows me whole, but most days, it doesn’t even cross my mind.

I have lived what feels like an entire lifetime in the few short years since this awakening. I have met some of the most amazing and important people in my life. I’ve fallen in and out of love. I’ve started a business, regained financial independence, and became the woman I always knew I was. I live boldly and confidently, knowing that this experience does not define me but has given me the perspective, growth, and empathy to act on our collective life purpose: to love limitlessly.