Self-help guide for the weary Psyche
“What do I find here?
Pass you all the day and the night in weeping?
Go to, do what you will, purchase your own destruction, and when you find it so,
then remember my words,
and repent,
but too late.”
- Apuleius (translated by William Adlington), the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche
1. The Reckoning (Where be my maidens Sorrow and Sadness?)
You wake up one day and realize that this is your life. I mean, really realize for the first time that
the past is unchangeable and your life is now a stone-garden of fossilized choices. You can’t
take back the stunningly disgraceful things you’ve said and done. You may think about those
things obsessively. Perhaps you relive them in waking fantasies, trying to tease out a different
direction or reaction. But there they are, your errors: chiseled in stone as a monolith of regret.
The knowledge settles around you like a lead vest.
You will be surprised by the hopelessness that swells through you at times. Maybe someday
you’ll learn to see it coming but until then you are easy prey, soft white legs dangling
unprotected in a wide deep blue ocean of fear. Be prepared for the compulsions that
accompany it: you’ll want to eat and eat and eat until you can’t feel anything but the gorge of
your belly; you’ll want to drink until your eyes can’t focus and all this self-loathing becomes fuzzy
and benign. You’ll want to grab fistfuls of hair, scrape skin raw, clench teeth until they break —
anything to release the buzzing restlessness that swarms inside you. You’ll wish you were a
runner so you could pound your body into submission but because you’re not — because your
body is a weak piece of shit and your resolve is pathetic — you’ll turn to escapism instead.
Novels work better than TV which works better than movies, but sleep: oh, sleep is the magic
bullet. Try Melatonin: it’s a warm quilt that gently weights your limbs and deadens your dreams.
Ativan, 50 mg at bedtime, is a feather-down comforter from which you’ll never want to uncurl
yourself. Save it for the worst times.
2. The Wanderings (she hurled herself hither and thither)
Before now, before the stone cold reality of the present, you lived for a long time in a place you
learned to call only half-jokingly, Alternative Facts. How you got there: your life spun apart and
you found yourself without warning in an infinite chasm of what-ifs and if-onlys. All paths were
going to lead there so don’t beat yourself up about it. That place is an impossibly tangled cat’s
cradle of fault-sharing and blame shifting and wondering and wishing, and it made you more
heartsick than you already were, but you were mired with needing to know and so you stayed.
You stayed until you combed through every possible eventuality that could have landed you in
that place, a beleaguered Psyche and her mythical grains of cause and effect. You parsed it as
his fault, your fault, God’s fault, an ancestor’s fault; you proved it to be the outcome of an infinite
number of decisions. If now is X, you solved the equation a thousand different ways. When you
finally realized that it doesn’t matter, that it’s everyone’s fault and no one’s fault and that’s just
how the cookie crumbles, babe, because shit happens, the power of that place dissolved and
you fell through the bottom of the chasm into a place that felt better, sure, but oh honey, was it
so much worse.
(Then poor Psyche perceived the end of all her fortune, thinking verily that she should never
return ... since she was compelled to go to the gulf and furies of hell.)
Despair. That’s what you know to call it now, hindsight 20/20 etc., but at the time you called it
What Does It Matter. Alternately: Why Not? or Fuck It All.
Here’s how you figured it: you were 28 years old and you’d played by the rules your whole life.
You did what was expected of you, tried to do good, do right, be good, be perfect — and you
pretty much were (ask anyone!) — and suddenly you discovered it to be a false promise
because after all that sincere effort, your life was the worst of anyone you knew. So you figured,
why even bother? If following the rules got you an alcoholic husband who after six years of
pretty miserable — ok, let’s be honest, abusive — marriage wouldn’t even put in the two hours a
week that he was allowed with your 18 month old kid because he was lying about drinking, then
fuuuuuck that.
Maybe you didn’t lay it out exactly like that at the time, because again, hindsight, but that was
the general feeling that grew in you. It blossomed larger and larger until it filled your whole chest
with resentment and nihilistic apathy for the values that had thus far driven your life.
Nothing matters. QED.
And then you discovered that you could want things. Six years of cognitive dissonance had
done a real number on your ability to discern what the hell was going on inside your own head,
and you’d almost forgotten what it felt like to want, and for want to be ok. Legitimate. But one
day a revelation came to you, as they often do, in the shower. Shaving your legs, your brain
humming along with anxious thoughts about grocery shopping and meal planning and how to
patch together the budget for some much-needed wardrobe adjustments, you suddenly tuned
into your mind’s offhand dismissal of the basic right to have clothes that fit. Not for your
estranged husband, not for your son, just you. You took stock and realized that you’d been
minimizing yourself to the point of nothingness. You got angry, and that felt better than the
numbness that had filled you for so long.
For a couple months you forced yourself to look squarely at every feeling and voice it with
childlike simplicity. “I feel angry. I feel sad. I feel lonely. I feel lost. I feel powerless.” The
numbness was still there but you could start to describe it, and that gave you power.
And the power was intoxicating.
You realized that this was how other people lived their lives: wanting things and acting on
impulses. Doing what they wanted. Taking what they wanted.
And dear God were you awash with regret for all the years of being a good girl. The
earnestness and virtue which had been the hallmarks of your life now seemed senseless and
naive and vaguely embarrassing. You were hungry for the kind of selfish recklessness that
seemed to work just fine for everyone else.
So, there you were, in the no-man’s land of despair with the taste of power thick like honey on
your tongue, and nothing mattered. You were spectacularly sad and yet giddy with freedom.
Sweet darling. Such a lethal combination.
Do you remember what happens next? Of course you do. This stone-garden is your home. Just
take a look around: over there are the bad things that happened next. Right here, these rocks
wedged painfully beneath you? Honey, these are your offences.
(But alas! While she was in this great joy, there fell out a drop of burning oil from the lamp upon
the right shoulder of the god.)
I won’t enumerate the bad decisions, but they were bad and they were plentiful. You learned
that things could get worse, and that there is no pain quite so acute as that which you have
wrought yourself.
That the total destruction of a life can be executed in just a handful of days.
3. The Impossible Tasks (she went up to a high tower to throw herself down headlong)
And now.
Now what?
Now you live with more regret than you had thought possible. It devours you. Now the life that
had been miserable, yes, but still your life — one that you had built slowly and painstakingly and
was the comfortable equivalent of a ratty old sweater, not pretty or warm, but at least you knew
where all the holes were — it’s gone.
Now you’re 30 and aimless and broken, the single mother of a boy whose purity and innocence
is frankly the only thing keeping you alive on this earth. You know this kind of life is not
sustainable. You know you can’t forever be the girl that hisses fuck you fuck you fuck you at her
own reflection. But you also don’t know how to be any other kind of girl.
You want to send out a public service announcement: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED TO ME. I
AM HURTING. EVERY ASPECT OF MY LIFE IS TINGED WITH SADNESS. I HATE EVERY
GODDAMN ONE OF YOUR HAPPY FACES. You’re surprised it doesn’t already blink over your
head like a neon halo. Every picture you see of a friend’s pregnancy or marriage is a reminder
that you won’t have another baby and that your marriage failed and you’re alone. But you can’t
stop yourself from looking more, more, swiping endlessly through the missives of other people’s
success, taking each one as a shake of salt in the raw flesh of your grief. You want justification
for the years of being wronged. You also want to hide the ugly truth from everyone and live out
the rest of your days as a recluse.
You feel frozen with grief.
4. Crossing the Styx (but the tower spoke to her)
Now
what.
Now you summon all the courage you’ve ever possessed and every scrap of love for your little
boy and you tell yourself: THIS IS MY LIFE. I still have power and I will not use it for self-
destruction and I refuse to let another manipulative or opportunistic asshole take it from me. I
will stand down the waves of despair without sinking and I will dwell in the shadow of grief for as
long as I need to because I am broken and I am strong and I am more than my wounds and this
is not the end of me.
Now you take a deep breath and admit: I am you.
And I forgive you.
Claire Hanlon lived in five countries by the time she was 17; she has settled for good in North Texas, where she resides with her young son. She works in medical administration but would read for a living if loving books was a paying career.