mcleaveyexamples+diary

04/21/2008 My husband is amazing... he has been willing to step in the "line of fire" to ask me if I"m really hungry. Normally it's after a meal when I'm rummaging through the kitchen for something to fill my emotional void. I'm not sure if it's bravery or stupidity... but I know he does it because he cares and knows that I"m on my road to stop binge eating. I love him very much. Later... I need to slow down and enjoy my food. I tend to eat as fast as I can. Its almost as if I have to literally stuff all my emotions down with food. Then when the food is gone... I don't feel satisfied because I barely even tasted the food. Half the time I go back for more just to taste it. That night... I really think that journaling is helping me. I get to sortout my feelings and why I'm eating. But it doesn't make mewant to eat more... it's almost like a release. It makes mefeel like I"m really changing this. And that is a greatthing. I just finished dinner... Kurt still isn't home... and I really wanted another roll. Just to fill the void of being alone again! But I pulled this out instead. And I feel better after writing. The rolls are sitting in front of me... But I don't feel like eating another one anymore

Examples of Diary or Journal Entries The following two are from a young black girl going to an integrated school for the first time: August 26, 1963 Today I found out I was going to an integrated school. I feel my life will be better, but I am also worried of what the kids will think of me. Their parents are very upset and protesting outside the school. I have mixed feelings about it. I know that if I want to fulfill my dream of becoming a black lawyer, I will need a great education and have to work hard. My life will be nothing without education. August 27, 1963 I just got home from school. It was terrifying. I am usually proud of who I am, but my classmates made me feel ashamed. No one would speak to me and I felt like an outcast. I should have stayed at my old school. I'm never going to be able to become a lawyer learning like this. How could I have thought this would work out? This was the worst day of my life. This journal entry was by Martin Luther King Jr. and later used in a speech: April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, NYC "Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor."

My ex-wife just went to rehab for cocaine a few days ago. I'm a former cocaine addict/alcoholic, so I know what she's going through...so she turns to me and confides in me. I really want to be there for her, but my girlfriend has a problem with me talking to my ex so much. I don't know what to do. My ex-wife //needs// my help. I'm the only person she has who understands what she's going through. But at the same time, I don't want to continue fighting about it with my girlfriend.

On top of that, I still feel guilty about her using. I feel as though it is somehow my fault. I had a relapse that lasted for quite a while when we were together, and she stood by me through it. I never did coke around my ex-wife, so she was never exposed to it around me, but I still feel like I'm responsible for her habit. Like she wouldn't have tried it if I hadn't done it. So I don't know if I should, but I partially blame myself.

I haven't drank or used in nearly a year and a half, but it's still hard to deal with all of this sober.