...When I was 11, I started creating a collage of candy wrappers that I taped to the wall of my bedroom. Every time I ate a piece of candy, I would find a place for it on the wall. It was a method of cataloguing my weight gain; evidence of the sugar I was using to further punish my body for being fat.
Several months before the start of my candy collage, I was visiting my cousins in the grassy hills of upstate New York where I spent a great deal of my childhood. Our feet slipped on green grass slick with sprinkler water as we leapt over the sprinkler head, gasping as the cold water struck our bare skin. Our parents sat in lawn chairs several feet away sipping warm cans of Bud Light. I took a break to go to the bathroom, drying myself off with a linty Corona beach towel before heading down the hall. After I pulled my one-piece bathing suit back up and over my shoulders, I caught a glimpse of myself in the full length mirror that hung on the back of the bathroom door. It was the first time I noticed that my stomach stuck out further than my cousin’s slim, tanned stomach. Outside, she wore a bikini that fit her body perfectly. I looked like a lumpy jellybean, and the realization was devastating. I decided to change out of my bathing suit and back into the comfort of my loose t-shirt and shorts. I walked back down the hall and into the kitchen where my mother and my aunt were grabbing refills from the fridge. “What’s wrong? Why’d you change?” My mother asked. I was crying. Their questions only increased my anxiety, and I couldn’t stop the tears. “I’m f-fat,” I sobbed, “I wish I looked like Fara. M-my stomach is too big.” My mother and my aunt attempted to console me, but to no avail. Eventually, my cousins came in from outside to figure out where I had gone. They soon understood the situation. My cousin Fara approached me. “You’re not fat. I’ve got a stomach too, see?” and she pushed out her stomach until she looked bloated with gas. I cracked a smile, but a seed had been planted in my brain, a seed of inadequacy, self-consciousness, and doubt, and it needed to be nourished. So, the candy filled the hole inside of me that the roots had dug, and the wrappers on the wall were something I could control even as I was losing control of my weight...
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...In the end, I t didn’t matter how successful Obamacare was or wasn’t; none of the Obama paraphernalia that decorated his car or his winter jacket made us any better for each other. He broke up with me during a snowstorm. The roads were laced with ice and unplowed. The snow trapped me in a house with someone I thought I loved who chose not to love me anymore. When I wasn’t tearfully asking him to let me drive back to my dorm room, I smoked cigarettes with my body squished between the sliding door and its frame; there was too much snow to step out onto the porch, so I was stuck halfway between indoors and out, inhaling fire.
Since my will to leave was met with veiled concern for my safety navigating the icy roads, I spent the third day of the three-day weekend burning myself with the stinging hot end of my Bic lighter. On this day, he rescinded his decision to break up with me. As if something about my catatonic state, the sick hue of my eyes, told him he should stick it out a bit longer. I should have made him stick with his decision. Instead, much like the election, I didn’t vote. When we finally broke up for good, I pulled out of his driveway and drove the two and a half hours to my childhood home. I pressed the dog tags he used to wear between my palm and the steering wheel; The Fleet Foxes played “Sim Sala Bim” on the radio. When I got there, I burned his letters to forget, releasing the flaming paper into the fire pit a few slim moments before the flames might have reached my fingertips. ...I assumed that the pink lady’s slipper was endangered because people thought it would look better in a vase on their kitchen table than buried in poison ivy and pine sap in the forest. Actually, the flower’s own anatomy makes it difficult to survive. The flower does not grow with food supplies inside its seeds like most do. The pink lady’s slipper relies on the presence of a fungus in the soil, which provides it with nutrients until the flower can sustain itself and eventually give nutrients back to the fungus. Its method of reproduction is also disadvantageous.
I imagine a small mining bee exiting its underground nest a yard from a pink lady’s slipper. After collecting pollen from a few forest flowers, it passes above the pink lady’s slipper once before turning back to investigate, attracted by its color. Bowls of sweet nectar glisten within the hanging bulb of the ballet flat. The bee enters, tasting the fluid only to realize it is not true nectar. The bee has been duped. Now trapped inside, the bee crawls along the veined, pink skin of the flower; backlit by a setting sun; the bulb is translucent, a piece of amber with a bee suspended inside. The bee soon finds its only exit, crawling through a small hole; the pollen that the bee had previously collected on its back brushes against the plant’s stigma, the only chance the pink lady’s slipper has at pollination. The flower’s reliance on deceit and manipulation to achieve reproduction seems counterproductive. Why would a creature evolve in this way, its very own biological makeup relying on lies to survive? I was born with a chemical imbalance in my brain that split my mind into two different parts: the desire to die and the desire to live. I can recognize the lies that stem from the sick part of my mind, but that doesn’t mean I don’t stop to listen every once in a while. No one wants you around. Your friends think you are annoying and mean. Your existence hurts other people. Everyone pretends to care. You are no one. You are nothing. The thoughts are like the incessant buzzing of a bee trying to escape, and all I can do is close my eyes and hope that the thoughts will find their way out, maybe through a nostril or ear canal, before I take them to heart. Dying young can seem like a good idea when I let these thoughts consume me. The idea of preserving youth and innocence in a world that works very hard to take those things away is tantalizing. But once you die, you’re not beautiful, you’re not young, you’re not preserved, you’re just dead. It took me a while to realize that I am not the pink lady’s slipper plucked too soon from the forest floor. I am the girl who has survived long enough to appreciate the fact that my father’s mechanic knows me by name. I visited the shop as a young adult and eyed the jar of lollipops, but didn’t ask for one because I wasn’t a kid anymore; I imagine if I hadn’t been alive to see that shop again, what the mechanic would have said to my father then, if there would have been only silence. I want to write about how I got better, but I’ll never be better. The task of writing this essay was at times so overwhelming that I was unable to write at all. I’m trying to string together moments of my life into an account of how and why I am still standing here today, how I haven’t given in to the dark motivations of my mental illness. This endeavor reminds me of toxic moments in my life and how happiness still doesn’t come easily to me, but at the same time I feel an intense need to share my experiences in the hopes that someone out there feels a little less alone, has a little more hope. Because people tear us down, but people can build us back up.
June “It’s a best friend necklace,” June smiled without showing her teeth. I pulled off the small cardboard cover to find a metal dream catcher pendant on a long silver chain. “Aw, thanks!” She looked at me strangely. Her eyes kept sliding toward the box in my hand and suddenly she wasn’t the generous best friend, she was Queen Ulterior Motives, your royal manipulator. “Look underneath,” she said below the car radio. Her long brown hair fell perfectly around her face; she had strongly expressed how horrible it looked before we left the house. I couldn’t find one imperfection. I wanted what she had. She stretched her arm over to my side of the car, took the box, pinched the thin Styrofoam base that the necklace was resting on. She flashed the empty box in my direction, and the light caught on the corner of a shiny metal razorblade. I didn’t know what to do, so I laughed nervously and took the box back. This was her true gift to me. I never wore that dream catcher necklace. Instead, we bought shiny metal razorblade necklaces from Hot Topic. They were our version of those glittery hearts that split in half, one half reading “best” and the other “friend.” Our necklaces did have a heart on them, cut right out of the middle of the blade like a terrible smile. Mr. Lee Do you know that feeling when you’re swimming and you try to touch the bottom of the pool after forgetting that you’re in the deep end? That split second of panic when your feet don’t touch the composite floor when you thought they would? Having an anxiety attack is like having that sensation repeatedly. That sense of relief and understanding when you remember you’re in the deep end, never comes. Instead, negative thoughts circle behind your eyes and around the back of your skull like a whirlpool you can’t escape. It’s when you start listening to those thoughts and trusting what they say about you that you decide to spend 20 minutes dismantling a bright pink razor. I had become so desperate to hurt myself that I searched how to get the blades out of a razor on Youtube (There are 55,500 results). I waved a lighter back and forth beneath the plastic around the blades and pried and pried with tweezers before I could hold the sharp metal, about 1 centimeter wide and an inch long, in my palm. It only took five minutes after I made the first cut for the guilt and shame to set in. Injuring my body was not a solution, but part of the harmful cycle of mental illness. “Life is like a clock,” Mr. Lee, my high school counselor told me, “one hand can be up at 12, and everything is really good and you’re happy, or it can be down at six, and you’re having a really tough time of it, but you just have to remember that the hands on a clock are always moving. You’ll never be in one place forever. One day you’ll be back up at 12.” Dr. S and the SSRI’s Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are used to treat depression and anxiety. Medical professionals believe that these drugs serve to increase the levels of serotonin in the brain and, in turn, boost mood. Cross your fingers that they work, however, and be sure to contact your doctor if you experience nausea, nervousness, agitation or restlessness, dizziness, reduced sexual desire, drowsiness, insomnia, weight gain or loss, headache, dry mouth, vomiting, or diarrhea. Antidepressants are like people, I guess. Sometimes they make you feel happy and healthy, others give you diarrhea. Trying to find the right medication is like playing back-to-back games of Guess Who™ with my doctors. “Do they have a beard?” “Nope.” “Glasses?” “I don’t know. Sometimes?” “Do they look sad?” At the end of the game, you’ve tried five different medications but all of your cards are still up, and you feel like you want to die. I saw a new doctor who prescribed me the controlled substance Ativan after one meeting and a questionnaire. Do you feel tired often? Yes ☐ No ☐ Sometimes ☐ Do you feel like hurting yourself or others? Yes ☐ No ☐ Sometimes ☐ How often do you think about suicide? Always ☐ Sometimes ☐ Never ☐ How often do you have feelings of anxiety? Always ☐ Sometimes ☐ Never ☐ I wonder if he had an answer key on the clipboard he held on his lap. (If they answer No to question one, send them home with some antibiotics. If they answer Yes to question two, leave immediately and lock the door behind you. If they answer Always to question three, refer back to question two. If they answer Always to question four, give them the good stuff.) Josh One warm August morning I received the news of my cousin’s suicide. During our childhood, we stumbled along the paths of our lives side by side, but as we grew into adulthood, our paths diverged. We were both carrying around the same dangerous pain, a red string of depression tied around our hips, growing longer as life’s gnarled fingers pulled the rift between us until suddenly the string snapped. Now, I drag the string along my path alone, through mud and moss. The end is frayed, but I’m still pulling it. At his funeral, I saw what Josh had been unable to see. I saw that he was loved deeply by everyone who had ever known him, the funeral home filled with tearful family members and young friends sitting in silent pain. I saw the opportunities and the potential now lost that he had not been able to see within himself. We wish that we could have changed his mind. It was his decision alone to make. Because of this I know that in my darkest times when I feel most alone, there are people out there who care about me and see the things that I cannot. So, I decide to live. I live for the people like Josh who can’t fight anymore. Scar Tissue You have a favorite pair of jeans. By continuing to wear them, you cause the fabric to rip and tear. You don’t want to throw them away, so you just keep sewing the fabric back together. The jeans are covered with small seams where you have repaired the breaks. You still wear them because, otherwise, you’d have wasted a lot of time and string. I don’t hide my scars anymore. If I were ashamed of them, that wouldn’t be progress. My scars are the remnants of the physical pain I caused myself; they are proof that I have healed. They are reminders of moments of weakness; they are evidence of my strength. They shout mental illness to everyone I meet; they tell you I am a survivor. It became clear that I had decided to live. Mr. Lee once told me that he saw a fire in my eyes. I like to think I have preserved that fire, my will to live a healthy life. I wish that I could tell you I haven’t harmed myself since that night with the tweezers and the razor, but it wouldn’t be true. I wish that I could tell you that I didn’t go off my medication this week, but that just isn’t honest. I can tell you, though, that I am now in a loving, healthy relationship, that I lost 20 pounds through diet and exercise, that I was able to finally kick my addiction to cigarettes. I have learned a great deal about the complex nature of progress. My experiences have shaped who I am today. My struggles with anxiety and depression add an interesting twist to every day life. Looking back on my struggles, the accuracy of Mr. Lee’s analogy strikes me once again. I have traveled back and forth between dark and light times, but I never remained in any of those places. Instead of letting my illness dictate where I will stay, now I am deciding where I want to go. I’m learning how to move the hands of the clock closer to 12. |
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