Good Girl Chronicles: The Future of My Messy Mental Health Memoir

Why I am Not Writing My Messy Mental Health Memoir

Every other month I go through my photos on Facebook and Instagram. I tell myself it will do me good to erase the visual reminders of mistakes I have made in my past, in case I consider giving the television business another go. I scroll through my pictures deleting ones that are blurry, pictures of provocative selfies, or me lamenting about whatever shallow man I was chasing at the time. The further I scroll down through my Facebook albums, the deeper I go into the darkest days of my life. It’s like a timeline that chronicles my own personal descent into homelessness, unemployment, and despair.

I tell myself everytime, I am strong enough to face these pictures. Strong enough to face my past. Face that a suicide attempt and my subsequent major depressive episode robbed me of a life I had worked so hard for. But, I am never strong enough. I always cry. I always mourn. I always grieve. I cry for the woman in those pictures who didn’t know who she could trust, or how to fill the hole in her heart, how to repair the mess she made of her career, how to rebuild, how to start over, or how to become the woman she wanted to be. I cry for the woman who learned so many lessons the painful way.

2017, Year I Became Homeless

I feel shame, guilt, remorse, regret. Then I remember why I haven’t touched my messy memoir about this season of my life. I am in constant war with who I am today, who I was after my attempt and what I did to survive after.

I tell myself I will get back to my memoir when it doesn’t hurt so bad. I will finish when the war inside me stops. But, I wonder if the war ever ends. I am processing this struggle in therapy. When I pray I surrender my past to my Heavenly Father, but somehow I always end up picking it back up.

That is partly why I am not writing my messy, mental health memoir. And, even though I am a bold advocate and speaker about mental health, a large part of me fears what those close to me will say when they read how far my homelessness took me, and how much it almost broke me. They will read the times I wasn’t so strong, the times I wanted to give up, and the times I failed.

2016, A month homeless & couch hopping

I am acknowledging this avoidance of my messy, mental health memoir in hopes of breaking free, writing through the pain, and one day publishing the story of my rebuilding.

I’ll share a part of the book I wrote last year. I have shared this at a few speaking events. This is how I plan to open the book:

The Broke Down McDonalds

An Excerpt from my messy mental health memoir

A Broke Down McDonalds : Prologue

You ever see a new McDonald’s seemingly pop up in your neighborhood overnight? One day it was torn down, the next day it’s sparkly new, powered with WI-FI access, and double drive through lanes.

I have often found myself upset at this process, and I don’t even really like McDonald’s. Whenever I see one of these makeover processes happening in my area I think, “Well that was a perfectly good McDonald’s. Why did they have to rebuild the whole thing? Couldn’t they have just renovated the inside, spruce up the yellow arches, or power washed the bricks?

It seemed so wasteful to me that a large corporate company would spend millions of dollars renovating the old, dank, broke down McDonalds. Nevermind that we are finally in the 21st century and many of those buildings were made in the eighties. Nevermind the black crude I would often see wedged in the red tiled floors anytime I dared to go inside a McDonald’s for hot cakes. Or the reports of rats running into storage bins, or the many, many reports of high cholesterol and heart disease McDonald’s played a role in. I just always think,” Wasn’t there anything useful in the old McDonald’s, why did they have to tear it down.”

Well I’m a lot like those old, broke down, dank McDonalds.

Like a lot of the Golden Arch establishments I started off really good, and I had all the potential to be something amazing. But overtime so many bad elements started to taint all the potential I had in life. Like the pink slime scandal when McDonalds was found out to be using fake meat, I surrounded myself with superficial friends, bad men, bought into an impossible pursuit of perfection, and passed it off as my personality. It was inauthentic, but with it I thought I was doing the right thing. But, I paid a high price for trying to live someone else’s life, and pass myself off as the perfect daughter, perfect employee, perfect person. When in reality I was just a McDonalds that ended up hurting herself ie her brand, hurting those around her ie customers, and then there was no way of salvaging anything. I had to be rebuilt, torn down, made new.

The bulldozer in my life has a name, an ugly, cruel battle of the mind that lead me down dark, dangerous paths. And, when the depression had lifted, the suicide attempt was over all I had was broken pieces of what I thought would be a beautiful life. Why did they have to tear down a perfectly good McDonald’s because there was nothing left to save. For a while I sat in my own rumble, rolled around in dirt of my despair, pity, and brokenness until I met an incredible architect. He was big man on campus kind of big. Larger than life. And, HE me that promised me that when HE got done rebuilding me I would not only be made new, I would be the best damn McDonald’s on the planet.

This is my story. I am a Good Girl rebuilt. Just like it says in Jeremiah 31:4 “I will rebuild you and you will dance again.” You are about to witness my rebuilding, and in the end we’ll all have the most epic dance party ever heard of.

“I will rebuild you, and you will dance again.” - Jeremiah 31:4