This is from a term paper that I wrote for one of my college classes. Please read it. I hope it can help someone.
When I received this assignment, I knew I would have no trouble finding something to write about. I think that I am the classic case that has been described in every lecture this entire semester; I have found pieces of myself in every topic that has been explored, and I know that I have grown immensely as a result. The ugly pattern began in late childhood, or, as described in lecture and The Ego and the Id, my latent stage of libidinal development. I had been a normal child with no extraordinary family problems, but for some reason I began to feel very anxious and pressured by everyone around me. Even at age 11 or 12, I would keep extensive lists of things that I needed to accomplish for the next day, stay up all night quivering with worry because I knew that I wouldn’t get exactly eight hours of sleep, cry for hours after school because I felt “fat” and worthless compared to other girls, and worry constantly that I was pleasing my parents and teachers. These feelings were far from justified to everyone around me, even my parents. After all, I was the perfect student, the well-behaved girl who followed all the rules, the smartest person in Sunday school, and the most talented student in my piano studio. But I always knew something was different, I always felt heavy with burden. There had to be a reason why I could never be happy, there had to be a reason why I never could be “enough,” there had to be a reason why I always felt there was something missing. As I became older and maturer, most thought that I had just “grown out” of my phase of anxiety, but, in actuality, I had just learned how to mask it well. I had entered high school by now, and everything seemed fine on the surface, but there was so much going on underneath my facade of happiness, silliness, and perfection. I was even beginning to fool myself into beieving that I was happier in this state- I had many friends, I was respected as a hard- working (and somewhat obsessive and anal) student, I had become a talented pianist and all-around musician, I most saw me as a perfectly happy individual. But as one of my favorite musicians, Fiona Apple, said in a song I used to listen to frequently, “It’s calm under the waves in the blue of my oblivion.” I felt as if I had two separate lives-my social life and my real life- and both were becoming more and more fragmented by the day. On one side, I was making straight-A’s and excelling in music, but on the other side, I was drowning in self-hatred, anxiety, and the nagging idea that I was never going to be perfect. One may ask, “Why didn’t anyone notice?” Maybe I was just very good at keeping all of the negativity inside me. Maybe my parents were too scared to ask. Maybe everyone was in the same state as I was, thus, they couldn’t see my pain because they were too busy hiding their own monsters, negating their own experiences as well. Maybe I was a hopeless cause in the first place, a ticking time bomb that was bound to destroy herself and take everything in her immediate radius down with her. “Very early in my life it was too late,” I read in a book by Marguerite Duras and cried one night, for seemingly no reason. I had everything, but I felt like nothing. I had all the friends I could ever imagine, but I was lonely and longing for a connection with someone. I had all the freedoms and advantages of society, but I felt as if the walls were caving in on me. Now, I’d like to go back to where I began and talk about another very important aspect of my life: religion. I was raised as a Christian by parents who were somewhat quiet about their faith, but, nonetheless, very moral and kind people. It was also no secret that they had come into their beliefs only after making many mistakes in their youth and growing up in somewhat troubled homes. I always went to church and Sunday school, said my prayers and read the Bible like a good little church girl who didn’t want to make trouble, but, again, there was and emptiness to my actions. I was still in a stage where I wasn’t truly aware that Christianity wasn’t all sugary and happy, but that all changed rather quickly. All of a sudden, just like every other aspect of my life, I began to become consumed by the need to be a perfect, “sin-free” Christian. I can still distinctly remember the day when the bell went off in my head: I was still quite young, but I was listening to our minister preach a sermon about being “in the dark.” He was telling a story about a person who was searching for his little daughter in a dark street, and cried out to God because it was too dark to find his beloved child. God then replied, “You have been condemned to the dark and you will never find your daughter. If you would have lived by my light under the lamppost, you would not be here.” From thence on, I became literally obsessed about being a perfect Christian out of life-consuming fear of “living my life in the dark”-or, in other words, as I interpreted it, going to Hell. This was not the culmination of all of my problems, though; I still had a long way to fall before I hit the bottom. It got to the point, around the age of sixteen or seventeen, where I was so afraid of being a horrible, sinful person that I could not read the Bible anymore because I was just so scared of what new wrongs I would find in the pages that I had done. I was like John the Savage in Brave New World, I was literally hanging myself for my immorality- but, of course, by indecent acts were nothing compared to that of John’s. At this time, my parents began to actually notice for the first time that maybe something was wrong with their daughter. I had already confronted them many times, pleading for them to understand that I was in pain, but each time, they would turn away from me, chalking my feelings up to another stage in my life. They would say, “This is a hard time in everyone’s life, you’re at a very pivotal stage and a lot of changes are taking place... just try to be happy, ok?” Little did they know that they were asking me to repress my feelings. I don’t blame them; this is how their parents treated them, why should I have expected them to understand something that was too far out of their reach? Of course, this is how I feel now, but, at the time, I felt as if I was being pushed aside by the most important people in my life. The poison that I felt inside of me- the Vietnam War that was going on inside my head- did not only affect my relationship with my parents, it also ruined other valuable friendships and even destroyed a romantic bond. I would sit at school and I felt like everything was going on in some distant realm and I was just watching my “shell” interact with others. Amazingly, to this day, I have managed to pull off the grand trick- hardly any of my close friends even have a clue of what happened to me. Unfortunately, though, like I said before, it did actually ruin a few relationships. It didn’t take me long to feel totally disconnected from my best friend because I felt that everything she said was meaningless; I just wasn’t interested in normal high school life because I was not a normal high school student. As for my boyfriend at the time, I still hold that we destroyed each other. Both of us were just merely carrying out the “duty” of our relationship, and we really didn’t try to find the meaning beneath the pattern that we took on. By the time that we finally had it out with each other, we were both in therapy and on antidepressants. As Tolstoy expresses, “As long I was not living my life but the life of another that was carrying me along on its crest, as long as I believed that life had a meaning, even though I could not express it, the reflection... gave me pleasure.” By the end of summer before my senior year in high school, I had come to the point where my anxiety had morphed itself into depression because I had suppressed my feelings for so long. My mother, still basically turning the other way when I tried to express what was happening deep below the surface, finally gave in and scheduled a doctor’s appointment at my family practitioner because she thought that maybe I had “a nutritional problem or something simple like that.” Of course, nothing really precipitated from the visit- the doctor told me that I needed to eat more vegetables. Not surprisingly, many salads and various greens later, I did not feel any better. Back to the doctor I went, and he prescribed antidepressants, explaining, “This should help clear up your problems.” A quick fix. A dose of soma. Something to shut me up. A magic cure to return me to “normal.” Things actually did go well for a short time, but the longer I was on drugs, the more I began to realize that chemicals wouldn’t fix me. They just merely suppressed my true problems with my self even more. “I don’t feel like myself anymore,” I wrote in my journal. “I WANT HELP! I want to scream at my parents and tell them and SHOW them what I do to myself. I want them to know about the horrible nightmares. I WANT HELP! I need to cave in. I can’t do this anymore. Something is going to give...” Anxiety turned to depression, which turned to anger, which turned to depression; I was in a vicious cycle and I did not know how to stop my world from spinning. Thoughts of suicide and hopelessness never left me alone. I felt like I was living in constant torture and I was bound to experience this for the rest of my life because I was worthless and horrible. It got to the point that I was numb, I felt nothing. Physical pain became nominal compared to my emotional pain, so I would hurt myself as a form of barbarism against myself to suppress my Id, to suppress the anarchy inside of me. I felt as if I should not worry about doing anything right because I was a lost cause anyway. After all, I wasn’t talented enough to be accepted into the school of music at college, I couldn’t keep up my front around people anymore, hey, I couldn’t even decide what to wear in the morning without ending up in a pathetic heap in the bottom of my closet, crying like a baby. At that time, I thought that I was the most pathetic creature on earth, when, in reality, I was on the verge of a very important crux in my life- I was in a place where I could have gone down either path: destruction or rebirth. Luckily, I was saved. There are four reasons why I am still on this earth today: my therapist, God, my best friend, and my boyfriend. It may sound like a strange combination, but, honestly, I owe my life to these amazing people. To begin, my therapist was the person who helped me begin my journey to rebirth. She was the only one who did not judge my actions and my thoughts when no one else knew what I was going through. She spoke of many things that I did not quite understand at the time but now stay with me every single day. She told me, much to my confusion and even dismay (because, by that time, I had become so accustomed to pain, much like Conrad in Ordinary People had felt in the hospital) that depression was a blessing, a messenger that held the key to unlocking everything inside me and finally seeing the light. She forced me to dig up my repressed feelings and to work through them and taught me that perfection is not something that is worth the trouble and possible to attain. Even after all of the ups and downs that I’ve been through where my religion is concerned, God has finally found His place in my life. After learning about the great purposes that the Bible can be used for and learning how to distinguish between the knowledge of myth and the knowledge of logic, I have found a renewed faith and motivation in a higher purpose, in my ego ideal. “Consciousness,” as stated in Powers of Knowledge, “is both paying attention to values when you act in life and having all your values reconciled with, and connected to, each other.” I finally feel that my life and Christianity are connected, which, I believe, is a huge step in the right direction. My two closest companions, my best friend and my boyfriend, are probably the only two people to whom I owe my life. When I was at my worst, both of them were there to love me and accept me, regardless of my struggle, regardless of my actions, and regardless of what anyone else would say. I am eternally thankful for my best friend never judging me and always letting me cry on her shoulder, just as I will never forget how my boyfriend taught me the true meaning of love, loyalty, trust, and honesty. They have made all the difference in my life. In conclusion, when I look back now, I can see that my life was overwhelmingly meaningless and grounded in constantly “being” instead of striving for a greater knowledge and a better life. I wanted perfection on the outside, just as the Headmaster in Dead Poets’ Society. I had turned things that were meant to be symbol names, like the Bible, into sign names by merely analyzing the facts. I did not understand that maybe my parents had been negated in their childhood, and they didn’t know any other way to act, any other way to open up, so they pushed it on me. As Laing describes, “Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.’s if possible.” I do not regret the pain that I have been through, because the pain that I suffered helped me grow. I do not resent my parents because they have helped me to see their mistakes and learn how not to repeat them myself. I do not blame God for my problems because, without God, I would be nothing. If I would not have gone through what I went through, I wouldn’t be a better, wiser, happier person. In the words of Eliade, “The obsession with the bliss of the beginnings demands the destruction of all that has existed...” I am glad that it was not too late for me this early in my life.
