Jesse Teller

I was talking to Bekah about my blog the other day. We were talking about the posts I still needed to write to fill this year’s series, and an image came to me as if from a flash of light illuminating a storming night.

“I have an old blog somewhere,” I said.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“There is a blog out there somewhere.” The name of the site came to me and I realized that from 2008-2011, I had kept a blog. I had written it for Myspace, and almost no one had read it. When the site was folding, I had moved all the posts to another blog site and promptly forgotten about it.

“It has about 12 to 15 posts. Maybe we can get some ideas from them on what to write this year.”

It took a very frustrating half hour to find the blog, to figure out the password and the user name, because it had been too many years since the blog had been used. I was not ready for what we found.

What I had thought was 12 maybe 15 posts was actually 57. Fifty-seven blog entries from years beyond. Also, these were not written by me. Each had a name of an ego state beside the title. Each was written by a personality that was not my own.

I had stumbled onto the Lost Confessions of personalities that were gone. Minds that had left me many years ago in charge of the life they had protected for me. These were the words of the ones that had come before me, who had lived the horrors and the nightmares I had been spared from.

In 2011, we made a breakthrough in therapy and one ego state rose to take over the life of us all. All of the others retreated into obscurity and have not been heard from since. This blog was the last remnants of the voices of these men.

We spent the next few days reading what was left behind. What they had hidden from me until now. We found each was written with a different voice. Each writer had a style to his work that could not be denied.

The topics ranged from things that happened to us in school to abuse that we suffered. Bekah and I read about everything from confronting our abuser, to girls we dated in high school. I got to hear the story of our discovery from the mouth of the one that was discovered so long ago. I got to hear about the infighting and the arguments they had and the way that they viewed the others.

Within this body of work we found a letter written to my son Rayph about the thoughts of the man that was raising him. We heard a detailed account of the birth of Tobin. We saw them writing back and forth to one another, responding to things and stories that they had blogged about in earlier posts.

Revealing and raw, these words painted a picture of a life I did not see. A picture of men that are gone to me now, and a clear view of the things they valued and how they interacted with each other.

Some of these posts cannot be used. They are violent and depict graphic tales of the abuse I suffered. They often include things that would take too long to explain or that are beyond the understanding of an outsider.

But others are usable. They can be showcased in this blog as the spectral voices of a bygone era of my life. Words sent to me from those who cannot be with me anymore, the ones who took my abuse for me to save me from the horrors thrust upon me.

I will call them the Lost Confessions, the ghostly words of the departed. The hopes, dreams, and nightmares of those who are out of reach of all of us. I will massage these words into the blogs I post from this day and show a new side of the life that was lived by many men and one woman.