I'm Having a Great Day in Journal

And, I’m not sure what I want to say. I feel an expectation to be useful to other people, here. I don’t particularly mind that expectation, but I also want to acknowledge it and identify that I don’t necessarily feel the urge to fulfill it.
I listened to the introduction letter that I wrote to a show more than a year ago, and my thoughts were “Holy shit, that is my mother.” Right down to the wording, the inflections, the language, the clever back-up stories, the covering of every angle, etc etc. The entire letter I wrote was so incredibly self degrading, self blaming, self punitive, self abusive, that it was clear whoever wrote it hated themselves. Or, it was written by me as my mother.
I asked my therapist over this past summer- is it possible that my mother actually hated me? My therapist was noncommittal but interested. She is really quite good. I don’t find agreeable people to be good. I don’t find people who feed answers to be good. I find that when I am respected and seen for what I am thinking and feeling, that I feel good about myself, and I regard the people who enable that reflection as good.
Yes. Today is a Great Day.
I am happy to have gone back and listened to my old self from last year. It’s a reminder of where I was. How incredible it is that I can see clearly where I was. Sometimes, it really feels as if the therapy, the self work, the journaling, the dream analysis, the books, all the stuff, is going nowhere. Sometimes it feels as if nothing changes, that everything is as it always was. But that feeling of hopeless non-movement is only possible when I have no context. The context of that letter is so wrenching, so striking in it’s core of pain, sorrow, regret, resentment, that I have to really search for that part of me that empathizes with it anymore. It’s a part of me that has been integrated and does not feel the need for externalizing. It’s like remembering a dream from a year ago. Except, it wasn’t a dream.