Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Biographically Me


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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