Sooo...I've been writing. Well, not
recently. But here's an excerpt from an autobiography I was working on.
For years I thought of running away and consoled myself by writing letters to
the father that was never there for me. I painted him into this shining
knight that was going to one day just come and make me his princess and just
shower me with love, love, and more love. He was going to erase
everything bad in my life and I would get to live out my dream of being
wanted. I grew to realize just how much of a fairytale I’d created- but I
never consciously considered suicide. Until the day in which I dashed
about my aunt’s home scrounging for anything and everything that would make me
sleep away the pain that Band-Aids could never fix. It was another day of
exile. So when I got back to my grandparents’ house, I continued hunting
around for potent medication to swallow along with the small treasure of
sleeping pills I’d unearthed at my aunt’s.
My younger cousin noticed what I was doing and managed to wrestle the Tylenol
IIIs with codeine that I had taken from my grandmother’s supply. He
flushed them down the toilet with a triumphant smile on his face and I
pretended to be upset. When I was alone I quite simply took more from the
bottle in the cabinet. The phone rang. It was my mother. As I
listened to more of the same- stern unforgiving words, expressions of
disappointment, and appeals for me to change- I’d made up my mind. Any
doubts that remained about what I had planned to do evaporated. After
hanging up the phone, I filled a glass with water and swallowed handfuls of the
pills I’d pilfered. Not exactly sure of how dying would feel and not
wanting to experience any of its physical pain, I went into the room I’d become
familiar with over the past few years and laid me down to sleep.
The next
morning I woke up in a state of disbelief. The sun was shining. The
early morning birds were singing their morning song. And I was up in time
to get ready for school. It seemed like a joke all too cruel. I
felt absolutely normal considering the dangerous cocktail I’d ingested only
hours before. I know that I should have been grateful- I certainly am
most thankful now, but at the time I was furious. I had prepared myself
to die and that death had been stolen from me. I was condemned to serve a
sentence of life.
No one but my cousin ever knew what happened that night. For the next
month I just existed. My mother, finally at her wit’s end with me, took
me to see a family therapist. The therapist asked several questions which
I answered honestly in a wish-I-wasn’t-here type of voice. It was some
time before she asked me if I’d ever tried to commit suicide. I paused
over the answer because the truth of the matter was that I did commit
suicide. The sleeping pills were about a month past their expiration date
but the number of Tylenol IIIs alone should have been enough. Resigned, I
answered her question in the affirmative. Diagnosis: major
depression. Recommendation: hospitalization and Prozac. Great.
Just great.
From there my life just seemed to snowball. First it was the unexplained
failed suicide. Then the hospitalization with the crew from the Young and
the Hopeless. Next came the rape. Followed by the phone call confirming
the pregnancy resulting from that rape. Add to that a family who looked down on
me once they found out about the pregnancy. Then top it off with the fact
that I was still in almost daily conflict with my mother. All this within
4 months at the tender age of sixteen. And, thanks to the Prozac, I
couldn’t feel a thing.
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