The Butterfly Effect

I hate myself.

This isn't news. What could be more mainstream than a twenty-something college graduate with low self-esteem struggling to make ends meet? It's not just my lack of success contributing to my demise, however.

Yesterday, I loved myself.

I suffer from a version of the butterfly effect that I seem to have coined as exponential depression. Wikipedia defines it: In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.

A small change in a single individual's attitude toward me, a tiny mistake on a piece of paperwork, or even the slightest suspicion that I'm not perfect sets off an unstoppable pummeling of negativity. A single "you messed up, don't do it again" will translate into "I'm the worst thing to ever happen to this set of circumstances and because of this I should cease to exist."

I don't know where the path turns into a slippery slope, or even why, just that it does. And hitting rock bottom never gets any easier. I can't keep scribbling these little suicide notes if I don't take them seriously.

I have a favor to ask of you. If you see the butterfly flapping its little wings of despair, could you call Ashton Kutcher and ask him to set it all right for me? Or perhaps he'll make me disappear...

Oops, spoiler.