Mining My Misery for Blog Posts

It’s my party, and I’ll whine if I want to

Writing blog posts based on my life can be tricky. It feels tricky. Sometimes, it even feels a bit muddy, and by muddy, I mean dirty.

It feels dirty. But it also feels good. Cathartic. Therapeutic.

My life is amazing now, but it wasn’t always this way. I got divorced young and married even younger (it’s funny how that works). My husband was an alcoholic and an addict, and I’d love to be more empathetic about his addiction, but he was just so mean.

He could be sweet when he was with his friends and family, but the second we stepped inside our house he’d turn into a completely different person.

I prided myself on being a genuinely happy and optimistic person, but his mood swings made me feel like I was walking around with my head in a storm cloud. As long as my husband was drinking and drugging, I wouldn’t have a moment of peace.

If I didn’t have that awful experience at 19, then I might be anxious to get married now at… this age.

I think he might have done me a favor. Get all the marital misery out of the way upfront. Anyway, despite mining my misery for stories, I promise my life is amazing now.

Let me back up. I married my husband because I thought he would change. I’m a natural fixer, and I wanted to fix him so much. He was a “recovering alcoholic,” but he’d gotten himself into other trouble, and it all culminated in his alcohol abuse. As it turned out, he really wasn’t recovering at all.

I also married him because we both wanted a place of our own, and neither of us could afford to do it solo. It isn’t that I never loved him. I did. It’s just that my love was gone by the first week after the honeymoon.

There were days when I was so depressed that all I wanted to do was have a glass of wine and eat a whole pizza. Seriously, can you imagine not having those options available? That’s what my life was like for the five years I was married.

Wine and pizza were my medicine.

I went through a lot during that period of my life, but reflecting on it makes me grateful for and proud of the person I am today. Not only did it make me stronger and more determined, but it ended up giving me a voice that I love to use every day.

So what’s this got to do with blogging? More than you might think.

The lessons I learned along the way are ones I use today in my personal life, and in my blog, especially in my blog.

Because when you get right down to it, I am a blogger and an oversharer, and if I didn’t have stories from my life to draw upon, then I wouldn’t have any stories at all.

But that’s what we do as bloggers, isn’t it? We write about the times when the crap hit the fan, and we wonder where everything went wrong. It’s a strange existence really, being able to share stories about failed marriages or bad relationships, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is a tribute to blogging and what it gave me after a very difficult period in my life. It’s also a note of encouragement to anyone who is working through difficult times of their own.

Thank you to James Knight whose comments and conversation sparked the idea for this post.