Siryn’s Song

A chrysalis is a covering for butterfly in its pupal stage. It is the cocoon. From it, the butterfly emerges. It’s fascinating to look at.

This period of my life is a chrysalis.

It is a period of great growth and change. It is the greatest trial of my life. In the midst of this trial, God is going to do tremendous things. I am very thankful for my family, and my cousin especially, because she’s given me a new perspective.

In large part, I have stopped with the psychological seppuku. I’ve found a neutral place where I can feel safe, and made some decisions that are going to force me to change and grow in good ways.

I’ve made my move back to DC and I have a great new appreciation for the place. I have never been so happy to be here. I’ve also decided to strike out on my own and hang out my own shingle. I’ve gotten a part time job to help with the bills while I seek to build a client base.

This is going to force me to come out of my shell and learn how to network with people. I’ve regressed over time, allowing my shyness tendencies to overcome me. Although I have became good at making small talk and engaging people one on one, big crowds have always intimidated me, and wading into one to make connections has always scared me out of my wits.

So now I need to become a social butterfly, in order to build my business.

Isn’t that something? God is funny like that.

This post has been brewing for some time, because this Lucy has some ’splaining to do. It is a necessary entry in order to view what comes next without it seeming cryptic. I need some place to sort things out, and for a long time, it was denied me due to technical difficulty and a certain apathy to fixing whatever was wrong. My blogging habit had been broken some time before, so I wasn’t compelled to fix it until I really needed it.

The last few months have brought a long-simmering internal conflict to a head.

For the last couple of years, I have been really unhappy. This unhappiness was beginning to manifest itself in many ways. I was sleeping a lot (a LOT) more, and going out less. My performance at work began to suffer. My already high computer usage became more like addiction. If it wasn’t addiction before, it became one, and it was… still is a problem. In a nutshell, I was… am… was… majorly depressed, and it was eating me alive. I was breaking, and breaking badly. I felt that I had ruined my life.

I loathed myself, and did not feel qualified to do anything. I was afraid to put myself out there and apply for jobs, because I was certain that I would be judged negatively based on what I felt were overly mediocre law school grades. I can’t do anything about them, but still I punished myself for them. Despite my great pedigree, I was ashamed… this feeling continues to haunt me, even as I try to be more positive about myself and my abilities.

I would look in the mirror and hate my image. I saw a face that only my parents could love, as all my old acne scars just took on greater life. Sometimes I wondered aloud, “who could ever love you?” I have never really felt “pretty” and it was just enough to see them and hate myself a little more for picking at my skin so long ago. Everything about me, I felt was dark and ugly. But outwardly, I would not let that show.

In late November, I found a doctor that I liked and sought treatment. In some ways it really was too little, too late, but it was something. Unfortunately, that got cut short when I left my job in January. It was too soon, because I think I was just about to really get beyond the multitude of of my surface problems and down to the root of it.

The question my doctor kept asking was, “why are you so hard on yourself?” And I had to think back and see where it started. As far back as I can remember, I never really felt “normal” and never felt pretty. I remember my sister being afraid that I’d grow up to be some goth-like kid, wearing all black. I recall signing a girl’s yearbook in middle school… I think 6th grade or so… “Don’t be a nobody like me.”

The funny thing is, I cannot answer the questions “who told you you were unworthy?” “who told you you were ugly?” I have some ideas about where the feelings came from, but some of it is so deep I’m not even sure where to begin. The grades are an obvious thing, but where did this desire to please and perform come from?

Although my brother’s death is a part of this problem, and I do have survivor’s guilt, it is not the root of my unhappiness. I would say that my depression probably started long before that, although his death has been a catalyst for other negative reactions inside of me, and helped in piling on the self-loathing.

I used to consider myself a master at repression and self control, but found myself losing a lot of that control. I was careening off track and even though I was aware of it, I didn’t truly care.

I wanted to die.

Yet parts of me did not. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was a waste, especially in comparison to how hard my brother fought to live and every time I was reminded of that, I was shamed even more for wanting to die and wanted to die a little more.

I think it was that my brain is the only good thing that I felt I had, and now that it’s worked against me, I have nothing.

I had set high standards for myself and did not reach them, and judged myself an utterly unworthy failure. I didn’t have a job I liked, because I didn’t feel that I could attain it because of my grades. I wasn’t married like I had planned, because I didn’t feel that the man I had wanted really loved me or needed me. And then with my brother’s death, I lamented the fact that despite my great love for him I never made time because I was always too busy doing something for myself – either work, or just decompressing from work. I didn’t do the right thing and take the time to know him, really know him, as an adult. I felt like a horrible, rotten, despicable creature.

It took everything of me to get up in the morning and go to work. My mother started calling me every day to wake me up, as I had overslept to disastrous effect a couple of times. My ability to stay up late and get up early disappeared at entirely the wrong time in my life.

I have always had high standards for myself because I have been aware of my potential and my many gifts. With great power comes great responsibility, right? My pride was turned on its head and worked against me.

So I continued to cut myself psychologically and I was bleeding, bleeding… hemorrhaging my self-esteem and any positive feeling about myself. I think the only reason why I didn’t harm myself physically was because I knew it would hurt my family.

I know that a large part, if not the entire thing, is a problem with my faith. But when I didn’t feel worthy to live, why would I really think I was worthy of heaven? And yet it would be stupid to kill myself, because the problems are just temporary and I would be subjecting myself to eternal punishment – I didn’t really want to die.

But I had postured myself so that I could, and sometimes wished for it. In the months before my brother’s death, I had started looking at trains and instinctively measuring their velocity, and imagining closing my eyes and just slipping off the platform, almost in a dreamlike state. But it was something I never took seriously.

The negativity was a reflexive action, and my depression became chemical… in such a state for so long that it became normal for me.

My father came to get me and I went home for a while. Any energy I had upon finally leaving my job soon dissipated. I started getting some back, but it hasn’t been even. I went to stay with my sister, and a lot of things came out that made me realize why we aren’t terribly close.

And while I think I began to perk up a little, the consequences of my actions have really begun to rack up.

So the worst is probably yet to come.