Tue, 16 Dec 2003 04:31:42 GMT

Razor in hand, you stand in the shower like you have every morning for the past eight years, wondering whether to shave your legs or try to slit your throat. Rosy cheeks and stupid smiles aside, you never really were the cheery person you seemed to be. You contemplate this, among other things, until the beads of water rolling down your back turn cold and every hair on your body stands on end. You tell yourself that it's difficult to shave in such a condition, carefully returning the pink Lady Bic razor to the same place you've put it for the past eight years, and sit on the floor of the shower until you can feel your hands again.

If you were to slit your throat, the shower is the ideal place to do it. Your skin is easier to cut when wet, and running water means little to no mess. Die naked. Go out the way you came in. When you finally run out of hot water, the cold water helps to cool your body so nobody knows how long you've been there. Nobody can assign blame to themselves for not being able to stop you. If you were to attempt suicide in that fashion, it's best to do it when everyone is at school or work, so you have a few hours for rigor mortis to set in. If you don't die of blood loss or shock or from those handfuls of Zoloft you swallow before you step into the shower, then you'll freeze to death if you leave the window open. Don't write a note. And don't be surprised if, in your last few moments, you wish they weren't your last few. Don't be surprised about that at all.
If one day you find that you aren't sad anymore, get in your car and start driving. If it happens to be your payday, that's even better. Your goal is to spend every cent you earned, and to consume; food, cigarettes, gas, liquor, and gimmicky crap you don't need, are all good places to start. You must do this before your head starts to hurt. A headache is the first sign of crashing, of coming down, of going back to depression. A headache is the ant to your picnic. A headache is the most anticlimactic thing in the world, but that is how you climax.
Bonus points if you think you are a bird.
Bonus points if you wake up the next morning with a tattoo, piercing, or sexually transmitted disease, and you have no idea how it got there, who put it there, how much you spent on it, or how you'll get rid of it.
Bonus points if the next morning, you think about slitting your throat in the shower.
Bonus points if you are me and have done all of these.
If your life was a movie… would anyone be watching?
Would it have a plot?
Would you care if it didn't?
For years, I've felt like I live in Must See TV Thursday. You've got Seinfeld, which was relatively humorous but lacked a plot or any direction, just crazy antics and bad hair. And then you've got some kind of late night drama, which was always depressing and tear-jerking. Two opposite ends of the spectrum. Opposite poles, if you will. Two. Bi. Bipolar. That's not me. Or at least I pretend it isn't.
Mornings are strange. While I am still in bed, I feel fine. I don't realize that I'm not well, because I don't realize that morning has happened quite yet. Somewhere between throwing off the covers and letting my feet hit the floor, I realize that today, or at least the next few hours, will be difficult. In the shower I might think about 234,097 different things, from politics to food to God to self-inflicted lacerations.
By afternoon, I will be bouncing off the walls with the kind of energy found only in puppies and cocaine addicts. I will drive fast and consume too much. I will think that I can do anything and suffer no consequences; no laws apply to me, not even the laws of physics. I can defy the laws of physics, of the Commonwealth, of the Federal Government, and I suffer no consequences ever. And I will drive. Always driving, with nowhere in particular to go, and always getting nowhere far too fast.
At about the same time my mother used to have dinner on the table, I will come back down. I remember she used to punish me if I was manic, before she really understood what was going on. My mother, the psychology major, didn't see what was happening to her own daughter. Maybe she didn't want to. Maybe it was too hard for her to think that the child she raised might have been a case study in an abnormal psych class.
Maybe she did it on purpose.
When I was twelve and cried myself to sleep every night for three months, she would tell me to shut up. She would sit in on my therapy sessions, where I would pretend that absolutely nothing was wrong.
Pretending that nothing is wrong is a skill I learned from my mother.
When I was fourteen and started taking Paxil, she would not trust me to keep track of my medication.
Substance abuse is a skill I learned from my father.
When I was fifteen, I cooked up and half-heartedly carried out a suicide plan. It was glorious. I would swallow nearly 30 grams of Depakote, chase it with an equally large dose of Prozac, and I would do this all at school. That way, my ex-best friend would have found me slumped over a toilet in the girls room stall where we would sneak off to smoke cigarettes. If she saw my shoes there, she knew it was safe to just walk right in. And that is where she would find me, limp, cold, and hopefully dead. I knew I had to time it right. Before I got on the school bus, I took twice my normal dose of everything. She called me Monday. I called her Dages. It was a Wednesday.
While taking a math quiz, I decided the time was right. I couldn't concentrate, I was paler than a fresh cadaver on the mortuary slab, and I thought I simply wanted to die. I wanted my revenge on her. I especially didn't want to take that damn math quiz.
That little stunt, which was truly just planned for attention, earned me a week in a little resort town we call The Hospital. Movies make it look like shit. I loved it. Three meals a day. Your own personal nurse. All the orange juice you could drink. Blood drawn every morning at 6:30. Can't sleep? Have some barbiturates. And oh, don't forget the phone calls. Or the playing pool in the lounge, or making E.T. mugs or trivets for your mom or watching The Wedding Singer and having half the room breaking out into tears and the other half laughing hysterically when Adam Sandler sings the song about Linda.
Don't ever forget about that, because that is where you, meaning I, start to figure out where you went wrong. You are surrounded by people who drank bleach, beat their parents, plotted to kill the president, and you tried to kill yourself, and you are laughing about suicide.
It is in that crucial moment that you, meaning I, realize that there is something amiss. You realize this because you are laughing at suicide, because you are in a hospital, because you even contemplated suicide, because your whole life you've been this way and never allowed yourself to understand why. Or just because.
That crucial moment, like the split second between realizing you're going to be in a car accident and the actual crash, is the most stressful but also the most peaceful moment in your life.
The biggest part of my problem was that nobody knew what exactly was wrong with me. I was told I had depression. The word "manic" was sometimes placed in front of it, and the phrase "post-traumatic stress disorder" was uttered several times, but I never had a solid diagnosis, just drugs. I was prescribed no less than five antidepressants, two sleep aids, and two anti-convulsives. I took these all within the course of the year prior to my visiting the resort.
You are fourteen. You wake up and the room will not stop spinning. You are hot as hell, although you are naked, the window is open, the fan is on, the heat is off. It is 32 degrees outside. You cannot stay awake in school, you cannot sleep at night unless you cry for an hour, you are always thirsty. You are constantly hungry, but you are shaking so much that you are unable to feed yourself. If you can stop twitching long enough to eat, chances are you'll become incredibly nauseous and once again, the room will start spinning. And even though you can't eat, your pants have gone from a twelve to a sixteen in two months. Although you exercise constantly and eat right, that weight will never go away. You wake up and the room is spinning. You lie down and you're clinging to the headboard because the room is spinning. You look at the ceiling and although it is dark, the white is too bright for you and it feels as if someone has stabbed you through the brain twice or three or four times. You close your eyes and you want to vomit. It is 32 degrees in the room and you are completely naked, but you are drowning in perspiration.
You are always drowning, and by "you", I mean me.
That's why I stopped taking all the antidepressants. That is why, one Saturday morning when I was fourteen, I wanted to die.
That is why one Saturday night you find yourself eating a candy bar and a soda in a hospital that is decidedly less posh than the one you will find yourself at in only nine months time.
The moment they decide not to admit you is your car crash moment.
The moment you first took the razor to your arm is your car crash moment.
The moments you take each subsequent drag are all car crash moments.
The moment you were born is your car crash moment.
By "you", I really mean me.

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 03:54:37 GMT

Hi. I'm Abby Lane.

No I'm not, but let's just pretend.

Abby.