“Punish” by Ethel Cain

For Annie Kapur’s Sing us the Song of the Century… challenge! Check it out below!

As a person who has struggled with immense shame for nearly all of my life, the 2024 track “Punish” by Ethel Cain means a great deal to me.

Through navigating and experiencing certain things in my life—the death of a loved one, a spiritual deconstruction, hurting and being hurt by others, lying, people pleasing, repressing my emotions, and having crippling insecurities about everything about myself—shame became, and perhaps always was, something deep-rooted within me, something nameless and strange and uncomfortable. Something manageable, too—until it wasn’t.

The realization that shame, self-resentment, and self-punishment are very real, almost tangible aspects of the self, of myself, came shortly after listening to this song for the first time, and a big part of the reason why was that I recognized the way I felt about myself deep down a lot of the time was exactly how this song felt to listen to.

For me, the dark, droning sounds of this track fully encompass what it means to wallow in the depths of a shame-filled despair. Its soft, sweet, crooning beginning slowly creeps into ugly, ethereal, crashing devastation in its last leg, with the reiteration “I am punished by love” ringing throughout the chambers of its hollow walls, cementing the darkness and the agony of such an existence.

And to feel punished by love—what a strange, ironic sort of pain that is. People like me, those who at one time lived only to please and appease others, feel like it is worth throwing their lives away, throwing their very selves away, erasing everything they are, to feel accepted, if only a little bit, by someone else. And yet, loneliness persists. Because without true love and acceptance of the self, we are nothing and nowhere at all.

This was one of the songs that helped me come to terms with my own depression last year, which sounds dark, but it truly isn’t. With acknowledgment of something heavy like that comes a decision to stay in place with the way things are or to change, and the desire to change, to become a person that maybe I could be proud of, felt like an electric pull within my spirit.

I had never felt anything like that before. Even with my grandest dreams in mind, I had always wanted to be the version of myself that would make others the most happy. But only after hitting rock bottom did I feel propelled to break myself out of that people-pleasing stupor.

“Punish” is a depressing song, no doubt about it. The themes of self-punishment are heavy and dark. It is a lonely, broken soul’s epiphany. It is humanity at its very core: love and pain, good and evil, guilt and shame. It is a low, dark pit, a level you cannot sink very much lower than. And it means the world to me, because it showed me there was nowhere to go but up.