08-19-00
In the fall of 1992, I was working two jobs, going to school full time, and I was very unhappy. I didn't like a couple of my classes, I felt very tightly stretched between my two jobs and my other obligations, and I was completely unaware that something wasn't right in my life.
One evening, running home from class so that I could change and go to my second job, I twisted my ankle on the uneven pavement, and ended up hobbling along the rest of the way. I took my shoe off when I got home, examining my ankle. I knew there was no way that I could stand all night in the drive thru window, but that they'd never let me off work unless they saw physical evidence of my wound. Unfortunately, except for some slight swelling, there was no sign of injury. I decided that I would have to flex my cosmetic muscles and make a bruise appear with eyeshadow and blusher. To my consternation, everything in the medicine cabinet was a frost or a pearl, which would have been exceptionally suspect. "Wow, that's quite the bruise. What is that? Grape frost and seashell pink pearl? Covergirl, right?"
My only course of action was to repeatedly kick the wall with my leg until it looked as bad as it felt. Of course, it ended up feeling a hell of a lot worse after all of the additional injury I visited upon it, and it only got me out of standing up in the drive thru. The manager courteously got me a stool to sit on while I took orders and money.
The part that is odd is that at the time, none of this seemed at all abnormal to me. Physically damaging myself as a means of escape seemed a valid and reasonable action.
I refer to this era as 'When I used to live in the bottom of the Bell Jar.'
With some parental consultation and some soul-searching, I decided to drop my worst class, go 3/4-time at school, and quit my fast food job. My family would assist with my rent until such a time as I was capable of paying my own way.
I think I was mostly okay for the remainder of the semester, but I might not have been. My grades were okay, and I don't recall any particular incidents of particular noteworthiness.
My roommate Alissa, who I will speak of some other time, went home for holiday break, and I stayed in the apartment by myself. The lock on our living room window was broken, and one day I came home from somewhere and noticed the screen was loose. I didn't think another thing about it until that night when I shut my bedroom door and realized it didn't close tightly. The strike plate, which allows the door to actually stay shut was no longer there. I checked all of the doors in the apartment, and Alissa's bedroom door and the bathroom door were also missing their strike plates. I ended up nailing the living room window shut with 20 or 30 nails, took the strike plates off of all of the closet doors and put them on the bedroom and bathroom doors.
During the holiday break, I had started having problems with insomnia. Paranoia added to that equation meant that I spent that evening pacing around the apartment, drapes tightly shut, with a butcher knife. Finally freaking out around 3 or 4am, I packed up some stuff and drove to my parent's house. You don't break into someone's house and render the bedroom and bathroom doors incapable of being locked unless you have something evil planned. Being a single female, alone over the holidays, I had no intention of finding out what that evil was intended to be.
The following semester, my inability to sleep started to really interfere with my daily functioning. I stopped eating regularly, and I started mentally berating myself all of the time for the myriad of ways I was fucking up my own life. I was too tired to focus on going to school, so I quit going altogether after the midterms. Then I had the guilt of wasting my parent's money on tuition I wasn't using. I hated myself. I served no purpose.
I constantly thought about how I should just die. I never actually thought about suicide, I just thought it would be easier on everyone concerned if I would just fall asleep and not wake up one time; sort of letting nature take it's course. I quit leaving the house. I sat around all day, watching TV and chain smoking. Sometimes I would play on the internet, or I would engage in things like slicing the back of my arm open with an exacto blade to see how deeply I could cut before I wimped out.
A friend got me to seek counselling, and that went fairly well until the counsellor I was seeing quit her job and moved away. The person I was referred to was a complete idiot. I was put on prozac, which turned me into a drooling zombie. I had no down days, but I also had no up days. I lost all interest in food, and actually had to be forced to eat. I lost all interest in everything. I kept cutting myself to see if I could feel anything at all. I felt like the nine inch nails songs, hurt. "I hurt myself today, to see if I still feel. I focus on the pain, the only thing that's real."
People tried to intercede. They would drag me out of the house to get some sun and some excercise. I weighed in at 93 pounds. My breasts had disappeared, my thighs didn't even touch when I was squatting down, and you could count my ribs from across the room. I still wasn't sleeping very well, and I had begun living off of my credit cards because my parents had cut me off financially, in a bid to force me to move back to their house in Cedar Rapids.
To this day, I believe that if I had moved back, I would have either killed myself shortly thereafter, or I would have ended up in a psychiatric ward somewhere for killing them. I know where they keep the guns and the ammo, and there's nothing at all to do there at the farm. There isn't cable, and at the time there was no internet. My friends were all in Iowa City, and I would have gone stir crazy without them. Instead, I fucked up my credit so badly that only this year did I finally pay off my last creditor. I won't be able to buy a house or a car until I'm 35, but I still have a living mother and father, which I feel is more than a fair trade.
I'm skipping through lots of details and people in this story. Lots of things happened that are relevant and important, and I did a lot of stupid and regrettable things. Maybe sometime I will tell you all about them, but for now, we must suffice it to say that I decided to get better, and I did. Despite the clinical depression and other mental problems that plague both sides of my family. Despite the unhappiness and heartbreak and betrayal that I haven't shared.
And, maybe not so much despite, but in spite of it all.
