I'm Not Sure I Ever Really Did...

I know who I tried to be. I know what I came off as. And I have a good idea why. Picture a girl, long brown hair in a half pony, nice, clean jeans, and a simple, maybe slightly preppy looking sweater and you'll have a pretty good idea, not so much of what I looked like (we couldn't have afforded the preppy sweater and anyway I hated wearing my hair that way) but of how I would come off to those who met me. Because when you see that picture in your head you get some idea (I do anyway) of how she might act. That was the sort of girl I was in public, growing up. My dad was always telling me how nice and polite people told him I was... and I remember thinking 'If they only knew... the effort that goes in to it... why I am always so nice and polite' (of course just as often I thought 'If they only knew what he is really like', heh).

I was a horrible child. I inherited my dads short fuse and temper. I was constantly yelling and, if I remember correctly (my memory of  my childhood is actually quite poor) I hit, a lot. Now all these things can probably be explained (let's make it easy, get Freudian -which normally I hate- and just blame my dad because that's the majority of it anyway) but that doesn't mean a whole lot. I was a horrible child. Thankfully (I guess) I wasn't such an awful child that I could behave like that and not feel guilt. I tended to, more often than not, feel very guilty after I had blown up. But always after the fact.

I knew this sort of behavior wasn't acceptable public behavior. And I knew people didn't like people who behaved in such a manner. So I tried, with varying degrees of success, to be the 'nice and polite' girl that I believed I should be. And as I got older I think I adopted that, for the most part, permanently. I became the girl with the long brown hair in a half pony, in nice clean jeans and a simple, slightly preppy sweater. The girl who was on leadership for her college church group (I lead worship). Who did everything with that group (all the activities planned, provided she didn't have to work). Who played and sang on the worship team Sunday mornings. For all intents and purposes that was who I was.

And then one day I changed. See, I was that girl, but I was that girl in the grip of major depression (and something else, it seems... I'm Borderline, you see). And at some point the idea that I might hurt myself popped into my head. And I resisted it for a long time. After all, That girl didn't do such things. That girl did what she needed to do and smiled while she did it. And then one day, she didn't. She became the girl who did nothing. Oh she still did what she had to do, and that most often with a smile (one that no longer reached her eyes but one that pleased everyone none the less, one that made them comfortable, made them think that everything was just fine... one that fooled them), but that was it. She quit leadership, quit the worship team, quit everything. She drank too much and hurt herself. She dyed her bangs bright red and pierced her tongue. She wore heavy make up (where before she hardly wore any at all).

Now I am stuck somewhere in between. A college graduate with a psych degree, I am lost. I'm on the worship team again. I rarely drink (just don't want to). My bangs are now the same color as the rest of my hair (I do miss the bright red, though, lol). I rarely wear make up. My tongue is still pierced and I still hurt myself.

But I don't know who I am.

I'm not sure I ever really did.