Here today...

I became frightened tonight of how distinctly I still see the memory of that sickly, fragile person I used to be and how often I seem to forget about her completely.

It is good to be reminded of where I used to be.

She comes back occasionally. I hate her - really - and I hated her back when I was trapped inside of her. At the time, it just felt like me, though. It felt like I was genuinely that rotten, all the way through.

Is this confusing? Allow me to explain.

The thought of how destructive I was feels like a puncture wound. It is something I need, though, to understand how profoundly God has worked in me and how tragic my life would now be if I had decided to go the other way.

I listened to "Waltz #2" by Elliott Smith a few times tonight. (HERE it is - so raw and so hollow). It was a song Jackie was really into at the time and I think she and I listened to it on repeat for literally about a week non-stop. It's so good.

But it took on a new meaning to me tonight as I listened to it, just as it once took on another meaning, back when I was that other girl.

Months ago I listened to this song - I used it as a potent drug to numb my pain, to think, "Thank God there is at least someone who knows how to say what I feel."

The lines in the song with which I most strongly identified:

I'm so glad that my memory's remote,
'cause I'm doing just fine hour to hour, note to note.
Here it is - the revenge to the tune:
You're no good.
You're no good, you're no good, you're no good.
Can't you tell that it's well understood?

and

Here today,
expected to stay,
on, and on, and on.
I'm tired.

I'm tired.


I found myself thinking, "This is what it feels like."
The revenge to the tune - push the thoughts from your mind, hide the memories from your mind's eye, and your self-deprecation comes back even stronger when you slip up - "You're no good, you're no good, you're no good."

Like a mantra.

I felt that someone was forcing me to be alive - like there was nothing good about it - "Here today, expected to stay" - and it seemed like it would go "on, and on, and on."

I was tired.


Months ago, this is the person I was. My only solace was to curl up in a song like this and allow myself to be ripped apart by the relentless words that spoke to me as if from my own mind. My cousin, who is very insightful, identifies this kind of so-called "solace" more accurately as "emotional cutting" - intentionally inflicting pain on oneself in an attempt to get away from the more intense pain.


Tonight, I listened to this song and remembered my feelings about it from months ago. It scared me. I had very narrowly dodged a bullet.

I would like to remind everyone that Elliott Smith, while a brilliant musician and lyricist, suffered from severe depression, was a drug addict, and made multiple suicide attempts before finally succeeding and ending his life.

The idea that I ever identified so, so strongly with what were words likely influenced by thoughts of suicide frightened me terribly when I listened to this song again tonight.

Could I have gone down that same road?

I am not saying I was ever depressed enough that I considered suicide. I would never lie about something that serious - I did not consider it.

But the idea does still linger - if I had not finally turned to God and the church for help, would I be closer to considering it?

I think it is important for me to think about these things. Dwelling on them does no good, but I do believe that God rescued me from something absolutely horrific.

I am not writing this post to be depressing. I am writing this to be real and to share what I truly believe was the most important turning point in my life thus far, and I want to attribute it to God. It is all Him - everything is.

I am still trying to figure out where the turning point was, exactly. Maybe it is not God's intention to jog my memory on that anytime soon. It felt like an instant transformation at the time, but I know now that I am still being reborn, that I am still such an infant spiritually. I expect to be an infant until the day that I die, and I'm okay with that.

I hope I can write more about this later, and in a more organized fashion. I hope nobody took this to be a sob story - I just want to recognize how polluted everything about my life was before God and how beautiful and heart-breaking everything is now that He is a part of it.

He was always a part of it, really. It just took me a while to see that.

END.