Getting Personal --

[butterfly]

I thought about doing that 'Senior Year in HS' Meme and then remembered that my senior year was unutterably sucky. I almost flunked out, had no friends, and was only sustaining my will to live by watching Buffy (this is why, no matter what, I will never be objective about Buffy. She's my girl, she was the person that I took hope from in my darkest hour. She saved me.). My big situational depression ran from the middle of sophomore year to about mid-way through what would have been my sophomore year in college, if I'd ever bothered to show up for classes.

Then, I got my steady job (which I will be leaving in a few months, most likely, thank God, and I'll be moving into this better one that I'm doing part-time) and things started to get better. I made friends with jic and... I haven't had a close girl friend, one that I actually could spend time with, since before the badness. I started feeling more confident in my own abilities.

I'm still... very underconfident. I doubt myself constantly, but it's getting easier to remind myself that I'm quite clearly not hopeless. One day, I hope not to startle every time that I see an LJ comment (I always expect bad news or something hurtful -- I always expect rejection) to a post or comment of mine.

I still cut -- engage in self-injury. But I'm doing it for job-related reasons (the reason being that I hate my job) now instead of personal, which may mean that as soon as I'm able to quit this bloody job, the urge will die down. It won't go away. Cutting is a lot like alcoholism -- it's hard to give up something that you know will make you feel better. Every time that something bad happens, my first impulse is to cut. I don't know if that will ever change.

I have suffered from depression. I've heard more than one therapist tell me that depression is anger inside out, anger directed at the self rather than others. I can easily believe it. Because I'm more aware of that now, I can sometimes turn the depression rightside up again, as I'm trying to do with my feelings about the election and the direction the country is going. If the choice is between sending off $50 to NARAL or sitting in my room crying when I read the facts and figures that come up, sending the money is far healthier and has much more potential to help.

I think that in a perfect world, there would be no abortions, because every child conceived would be wanted and cared for. This is the ideal. We don't have that. We have a world where many of the same people who are anti-abortion are also anti-birth control, which really makes it seem more like a method of control than anything moral or ethical. We have a world filled with rape and poverty and manipulation and fear and misinformation. I'm rather on the side of Darla -- I find it hard to believe that people think that it's glorious to bring a child into a world so filled with hate and violence. In a world where we cannot feed the children that are already here, I find large families mind-boggling and rather selfish.

I'm anti-abortion. I'd rather never have one and I greatly wish that no one else ever wanted to have one either. But I'm strongly pro-choice, because I don't have the right to tell people to submit the use of their body to another person. I hate sharing an apartment with someone I don't know. I can't imagine sharing my body for nine months.

But I'm also twenty-two. I'm young and there are many things in the world that I do not yet understand. I'm doing what I can to support what I believe in. That's all that any of us can be expected to do. But I hope to be able to do more soon.

Comments

[ngaio]

::hugs you:: just to show I'm here and listening.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

It's... interesting, to look back and see who I was. When I was in the midst of depression, it was so hard to find anything that made me smile.

[ngaio]

Things go up and down, but on the whole I think they go up. And even the downs are strengthening. I'm married to Henry, diagnosed as depressive since he was 12 (he's 33) he's also a self-harmer though he's now 3 years 'clean'. And it's made him stronger, more self-aware, more aware of others than his 'golden-boy' brother who's had everything fall into his lap.

[butterfly.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do think that, on the whole, I'm a better quality of person than I would have been if I'd never gone through that time of depression. I grew up quite a bit, if in a roundabout way.