Check out Entry One  to meet Miss Misery and read her first letter to me.

Entry 2-I’m Just a Bottle of Mountain Dew and Mentos

Dear Marsha,

Growing up with a dad that looks down on emotions can really mess a kid up. I wasn’t allowed to feel. My father thought showing your emotions was a sign of weakness. He hated when I cried. He would say “You’re not crying blood. So stop crying” or “I’ll give you something to cry about”. Which usually was followed by some sort of whipping or spanking threat. Yes, I would get whipped with a belt or get a really good spanking for crying. Yes FOR CRYING! Needless to say I never stopped crying. I couldn’t stop myself and I hated myself every time for it. I thought I was weak. I thought there was something wrong with me. Vulnerability became my enemy. Insecurity became a part of me.

As teenager, I started becoming so angry with my father. I would have meltdowns from all the pent up emotions I had toward him. I didn’t know how to let go of my feelings in a healthy way because I was told to not show my emotions. I was like a bottle of Mentos and mountain dew. Shake me up and see me explode. I wasn’t encouraged to talk about my feelings. I would find myself screaming at him or punching the walls next to my bed. But instead of trying to figure out what was wrong with me, as all good parents should, my Dad handed me some book by Joyce Meyers on how to deal with my emotions. What the heck?! Who does that?!! And what ticked me off the most, my father was allowing himself to have anger issues, screaming fits, slamming doors, whipping me out of anger, blame the whole world for his issues. Yet he was telling me that I had to control my emotions. 24 years of this nonsense was too long. I was a good kid. I was valedictorian in high school, didn’t hang out with bad people, never was drunk, no drugs, no sex, never disrespected authority ALL FOR HIM AND IT STILL WASN’T ENOUGH. I was so done. I had to get away from him. Nothing else mattered at that point. So at 24, I packed my bags and left.

Leaving him physically relieved me of his constant nagging and emotional neglectfulness. But none of my emotional wounds went away. It drives me nuts. It negatively affected my relationships and I unnecessarily built up walls. In church when I felt God pulling on my heart strings, I made a huge effort not to cry since crying is a sign that something is wrong with you. Crying equals weakness. I automatically assumed my close friends had negative thoughts about me because something was wrong with me. As a result, I developed depression and anxiety. I went to counseling and when that wore off, I ended up being clinically diagnosed with depression by my doctor. So now I wake up every morning to a happy pill in the hopes I maintain sanity.

So Marsha this is what I say to my dad, “Thanks Dad. You made such a strong effort to turn me into you and you succeeded. I’m angry, extremely sad, stressed, ungrateful, insecure in my feelings, my relationships are damaged, my mind is a wreck and I can’t live without hating myself daily. Thanks Dad.”

-Miss Misery

Dear Miss Misery,

I will always thank you for being so transparent because it’s never easy to talk about your hardest secret moments.  Being a parent is hard Miss Misery, and I am in no way making excuses for your dad, but I want to take a moment and have you walk in his shoes for a second before I step into yours.  No one comes into this world with your father’s harsh, brittle, callous way of seeing life.  I can promise you that your father may have been in your shoes once sitting in his room and pounding the wall out of anger because he was showing weakness; then someone made him feel like garbage for it.  It is clear that what you showed your father maybe something he wanted to remove from you cause it reminded him of his own weakness.  Maybe he remembers how his weakness failed him and made him a victim of circumstances.  Sadly, I have been on both sides of the coin.  My father saw things in me he hated cause it reminded him of his own past so he tried to beat it out of me.  However I have also seen myself in my own kids.  I have to say it broke me to see those things in them and I wanted to rip it out of them.  I had to work very hard not to make my issues theirs.

Last week you said that feelings were bad…that’s was your conclusion because feelings basically betrayed you and sent you into a place you couldn’t come back from.  It now makes sense where that came from because your father did not allow you to feel, so to give into it reminds you of being weak.  He did not allow you to process life the only way you knew how to.  Your description of mentos and Mountain Dew is perfect because all he was doing was teaching you how to stuff your emotions until they exploded.  You see Mountain Dew is you and your inability to express your feelings. Your pain from you father–your depression are all wrapped up in that one piece of mentos and then when normal life hits, you get shaken up.  After ow everyone gets shaken up by disappointment, pain and loss but the problem is the explosion, the outburst and anger that seems to over take you.

The first thing I want to say to you, crying is not the signs of weakness–you are anything but weak.  You are much stronger than you have been given credit for.  To be able to resist all those temptations you mentioned shows you have, self-control, resistance, and mastery.   I guess the problem was that you did it for him and not yourself.  You didn’t resist those things only because you felt like they weren’t good for you but because you wanted to please him and prove something.  If you did not get the recognition that you were hoping for, then it will still leave you feeling like you weren’t good enough for your father.  Can you look at who you are right now and what goals you have set for yourself; are you doing any of them for approval or are you doing them for yourself?

So I think as we continue to talk I would want to let you know, you can not change the mentos.  Only God can change that because they represent hurts and pains that have to be dealt with and removed.  It only comes by daily, and I mean daily going to him.  You also can’t change the shaking up because we all will experience ups.  The Bible makes it clear that even those that love Jesus will experience trouble in this world.  Jesus is not our pillow on a turbulent plane ride, he is a parachute on a crashing plane.  So his presence in your life means you will survive in circumstance that you should die in.  These circumstances should kill you and I am sure that you have thought of death but with Jesus you can and will survive.

There is one thing you can control and that is the liquid you define yourself as.  If you were a bottle of water instead of Mountain Dew the mentos could still drop and the shakes can happen but the explosion would change.  As we talk I pray that there will be some changes.  You can freely express yourself and share since it seems to be your outlet.  As we address other issues maybe the water of the word can dilute the life you are in right now.  If you are comfortable enough, could you talk about the self-talk (the talks you have with yourself behind close doors).  The voices that come into your head that no one knows about.  I know there may be others that struggle with the same things.