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Trigger Warning: Depression, Mental
Illness, Suicide, Self-Harm
Note: I will be
discussing very heavy themes such as suicide, self-harm, and mental illness.
Please always remember to take care of yourself and know that your mental
well-being is more important than any article or written piece
I
grew up in a small town filled with pretty girls and awkward boys, in a town of
cookie cutter homes and old money, in a town filled with painful secrets hidden
behind lip glossed smiles. The kind of town you can drive through and think
about the beauty but not the unspoken truths lurking underneath. I grew up in
the picturesque county of Marin, just north of San Francisco, where the homes
have ocean views and everything looks perfect. Everything is just so.
In
a town of basic white girl living, where Lulu Lemon stores sit next to hipster
coffee shops and expensive electronics stores, Marin county does an eerily
encompassing job of hiding our insecurities. That is, until said insecurities
and silent struggles cause our fellow community members to overdose, or cut
their wrists, or jump off a bridge. At that point, we admit they were having a
tough time. That this was a lifelong struggle, and they had expressed this pain
before. Their family didn’t know what to do. This was just so sudden. No one
ever saw this coming.
In
my typical dark humor, I nicknamed it the suicide capital of the world.
Technically, the most popular location for suicide attempts is somewhere in
Asia, but for the sake of argument, Marin county is infamous for suicide, both
in reality and representation.
13 Reasons Why, the popular Netflix series
chronicling the tale of the events leading up to a teen suicide, films at my
local high school. Robin Williams hanged himself two towns over, less than a
half hour drive away from my childhood home. 1,600 people to date have killed
themselves by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Jumping off the Golden Gate
Bridge is so common Wikipedia has labeled it a “popular suicide location”,
which has got to be one of the worst landmark destination travel site titles
ever.
I
was raised in this town of carefully cared for secrets, of hidden knowledge and
unspoken truths. My childhood was the kind you could make sitcoms about, with
commentary over awkward childhood chats and a laugh track about the time I
killed my pet goldfish because I wanted to pet it. (My mom is allergic to dogs,
okay? This was all I had!)
I
was raised with art classes on Wednesday afternoons and piano lessons on
Thursdays and community garden events on the weekend. I was taught to smile at
everyone, and always play nice, and don’t interrupt, and do your homework right
after school. My mom packed my lunches according to a formula I set for her and
I still had regular meltdowns well into my teenage years. I had a laundry list
of undiagnosed mental illnesses. I cried at the slightest provocation but my
classes were small at the Jewish day school so that was okay. We lived in a
large house with more floors than people living there and twice the number of
bathrooms as any family would need. Because we liked entertaining, my parents
said. We wanted to create community. Connect with others. Make friends. Play
nice.
The
porcelain girls in public school wear makeup before middle school, wear tight
shorts and crop tops and rebel against the dress code. The cheerleaders are
pretty and our football teams are terrible. We are all white and pretty in this privileged little town. We go to private schools that
funnel into the Ivy Leagues. We sip our iced mochas in downtown San Rafael and
ignore the homeless on benches by banks and beading stores. We pretend we want
to see that artsy film in the Indie theater, we pretend we are better than
everyone else, we pretend we don’t care or we pretend that we do. The girls are
named after seasons, or biblical characters, or trending hipster baby names.
The dogs can fit in purses and the purses can pass as carryon luggage. The
blondes play dumb, the Jews act rich, and we all settle into stereotypes
without ever accepting the consequences.
I
didn’t know how ill I was, not until the depression overcame me and I cried
non-stop into my mother’s lap for 14 hours on an international flight. I didn’t
know why I was crying, I just had enough of the stress my brain was pushing me
into. I wanted to crack but I was being forced to stand still. Stand very
still, perfectly posed as the oceans of depression and anxiety slowly closed in
on me. I was 12 years old.
With
an invisible illness, you don’t talk about it. It’s not the kind of thing you
post about on Facebook between glossy quotes and chain letter style commentary.
My parents knew, and eventually I told my one best friend, Hallie, in eighth
grade. We’d been friends since the third grade, playing American girl dolls and
going to build-a-bear workshops and planning our dream homes in composition
books stacked up tall on top shelves. I told her before we left on our senior
class trip, afraid that if I didn’t have her, I would have no one. I did not
trust myself to care for my own body. Afraid my toxic mind would take over and
I would be lost.
Hallie
understood me. She had grown up with me, seen how the anxiety began to take
hold far too young and how my introversion became isolation. I didn’t want to
change, I told her. I didn’t want to wear a bra or giggle about boys or do
anything that would mean I had to grow up. Growing up, I thought, meant taking
something innocent and breaking it into maturity. She comforted me when the
boys taunted my messy hair and slouchy clothes, the slow degradation of my mind
being displayed on my exterior.
I
told her and only her, because I was scared. Scared what people would think of
my story, this terrible plot twist. I thought being strong meant holding it all
together, because that’s what this town taught me. Hide your insecurities.
Cover up your flaws. Wear long sleeves and stretched out sweaters, hide the
scars. Say you are tired, you are sick, you have a headache. When the social
anxiety gets bad, tell your friends you made other plans and pretend you are
sad to miss out. I lied to hide the unspeakable truths. This is just a regular
doctor’s appointment. That was just a scratch from a fall or a tree or
something else convincing. These were vitamins. That was exhaustion. I made up
code words for therapy, for psychiatrists, for medication, for everything and
everywhere I was ashamed that I needed. I told myself I was more comfortable
suffering alone.
When
the depression really hit me, and the anti-depressants didn’t work, the doctor
prescribed anti-psychotics. It was Bipolar II, a severe form of teen angst, or something. I wasn’t happy, I
was manic. I wasn’t angry, I was manic. I didn’t have insomnia, I was manic.
My excitement for new projects and sugar rush was clinically abnormal, as
though my quirky personality bubbling over meant madness, my thoughts a sign of
lunacy. Although this will later be diagnosed as ADHD, this misdiagnosis stuck
for many years. I took a frightening number of pills every night, pills that
shut down the bad thoughts but also the good ones. I swallowed these pills
obediently, pills that dulled my personality, that twisted and silenced, the
pills that turned my brain into an old-fashioned television slowing turning to
static.
I
suffered, silently, for years. I told my family and a few very close friends,
but I feared judgement more than I craved support. It became routine, this
living nightmare, my brain became foggy and the dark cloud was always hanging
over me. Any hope I had was a dimming light at the end of an ever-lengthening
tunnel. I suffered through all the doctors’ visits and the confusing
questionaires. My parents fought for my recovery long after I had declared
defeat. It took all of my strength to put one foot after the other, watch the hours
tick on, hoping that someday, maybe, there would be relief.
I
did recover, eventually. This long chapter of misdiagnosis and depression would
close, however tumultuously. A new book would open, one filled with stability
and academic success and advocacy about what it means to live with mental
illness every day. Yes, I was angry for a while. Angry for all the years I
missed. Angry for all the years I now had, years of a life I still wanted out
of. Angry that for years I lived with untreated depression and anxiety and
ADHD. Angry that the doctors didn’t see a person, but an illness, that my
personality quirks and awkward potential became seen as psychosis. Angry that I
grew up in a town that valued its secrets over its citizens, stuck in a
stigmatized culture that needed the suicide of a celebrity to admit that maybe
we have a problem. It took a Netflix show featuring a teenage girl graphically
slitting her wrists for people to admit that suicide is an epidemic in our
culture.
Anger
sticks with you, long after the object is gone. Because no matter how worthy I
was, how deserving I was to the life I am now gifted, I still could not shake
the question of what might have been. If I did this, maybe nothing would have
changed. If I went down that path, maybe everything would be different. Or
maybe it was all meaningless. Maybe I was meant to be that mentally ill
teenager, holding on to my security blanket of hatred and depression until the
Green Day songs of teen angst stopped playing, and I finally just stopped.
I
felt like a hamster wheel of recovery. The harder I fought to heal, the more
the depression set in, the anger, the fear for what my life would now hold.
Because no one tells you, once you wake up from that drug induced coma, what it
will be like. Once that half a decade long struggle against your brain is over,
no one tells you how uncomfortable it can be. My parents had a plan for me, to
live at home and make shaky art and cuddle in the deep dark hole with my
mind-numbing depressing until I got a community college degree. I had to get a
higher education, right? That was a give in. No matter the plot twists, I had
to fight back against the demons. I didn’t want to; My parents made me
persevere. Back in those days, when recovery was out of the question, this plan
of co-dependence made sense.
My
plan B was suicide, but we didn’t talk about that. My parents liked to pretend
that I was just as willing to fight as they were. That I wanted to recover, I
wanted to be happy and healthy and safe. But killing myself, having my final
act be one of my own choice and not that of my doctor’s—it felt comforting,
somehow. Death felt comforting, or at least, the option of death was a relief.
Knowing I could choose to end this exhausting spiral with a few handfuls of
pills and one final night of unending depression.
I
was too zoned out to kill myself back then, back in the misdiagnosis. I never
attempted suicide until I started recovery. It’s strange, I suppose, to want to
end everything the second the world starts holding out hope. But that’s the way
it is with mental illness, it is cruel and manipulative and one day, everything
in your room has the potential to destroy you.
My
parents knew about my suicidal ideation. That’s what the doctors called the
urges, and I sat in their big armchairs and plucked tissues like rose petals
and tried not to fall asleep from the overmedication. I was never hospitalized,
because my parents knew they cared more about my life than any doctor ever could.
Scars adorned my wrists like birthmarks and more hours were spent in my bed
than out of it. I remember one day, delivering a shoebox to my parents filled
with the scissors I collected from my bedroom, and holding it out to them like
an offering to the alter. Take this, I said. Hide them from me. Save me from
myself.
That
was when the writing started, when I pressed pen to paper and let my thoughts
spill onto the page like butterflies being set free from a cage of sorrow. I
wrote for long nights curled up with in a mountain of pillows. I wrote poetry
about how painful it is to be authentic. And then, I continued being
inauthentic. I still held my secrets, just as my hometown taught me.
My
junior year I joined a slam poetry group. This was the year I started titrating
off of the anti-psychotics and began seeing the world from the other side of
the looking glass. This was when I began to understand how far back I had been
held from seeing the beauties of reality. I was in an alternative education
program in the financial district of San Francisco, studying with overpriced
tutors my parents were all too willing to pay for. Talia, an acquaintance a
year above me in school, reached out on Facebook. She was from the Jewish high
school I attended before the depression became too overwhelming, the Jewish
high school I would later return to when my healing truly started to manifest.
I remember her asking me if I wanted to join her slam poetry project. It was
for her senior year, and a group of us were meeting in a house by the Fillmore
every Wednesday afternoon, from October to March, and we were going to write
our truths. The workshop series was called “Looking for Home”.
I
spent months in Talia’s comforting hugs, making eye contact and smiling for the
first time in a long time. Prom night I was at my grandparents, still
recovering and getting follow-ups from middle aged men in lab coats and
graduate students with wide eyes and blistered fingers. I wasn’t enrolled in a
school that offered a prom, and at this point, I didn’t know if I would ever get
the chance. I didn’t know if this was a future I would live in, one where I got
to dress up and awkwardly stand around while terrible music played over the
rented loudspeakers. I texted Talia, somewhat bitter by what I was missing. We
spent prom night talking on FaceTime and playing six clicks to Jesus (the game
starts on random Wikipedia page, and the player attempts to reach the Jesus
Wikipedia page by clicking six or fewer links).
I asked Talia that night, as we stared at each
other across laptop screens, why she wasn’t there at the prom. This was what
was expected of us, as high school girls. We were supposed to have this
experience. We were supposed to go to prom. She shrugged. It wasn’t important
to her, and she didn’t want to fake it for the sake of a cute picture. She
muttered something about a Japanese video game, asked me if I’d found Jesus
yet. I told her I was stuck on a page about Machu Picchu.
I’m
learning to live unapologetically, to be myself and embrace my flaws. I don’t
want to hide in a hometown of secrets anymore. I write, scrawling pages of
notes and doodles and margins of potential million-dollar ideas. I write, and I
heal.
I’m
not your typical 20 year old. I don’t party, don’t drink with the boys and
laugh at jokes that I know aren’t funny. I have more knitting projects than
pairs of shoes, more needles and notions than makeup brushes and lipsticks. I
have an old soul and an inner child and yarn balls in the double digits. I
spend my evenings curving my fingers and creating worlds with my hands.
I
practice self-care, including and beyond the clinical. Despite how badly the
pharmaceutical culture destroyed me in high school, I still credit my life and
my success to my anti-depressants. I write, because I tell myself that people
care. My voice matters, and maybe my story can help someone else who is
struggling. I knit on the couch curled up in the common dorm lounge, my
introverted terrified personality starting the long journey of learning to
live.
I
am learning to live, to not be forgotten. On the nights when the anxiety gets
bad, when I shudder with the old brain patterns of pain and tears— on those
nights, I knit. I soothe my mind with textures. Scissors decorate my room like
confetti, and for once, I am not afraid of myself. I am not afraid of where my
mind might go when the nights get too dark and the nightmares flood my
unconscious. I have yarn hidden like candy, in side drawers and under chairs,
reminding me I am healing. I have stitch markers scattered next to my bottles
of anti-depressants. I have scraps of yarn littering my floor, sprinkling my
gray world with color.
I
learned to create, during the transition to college, to living on my own, to a
world full of people I was just learning to socialize with. I would write on
the nights when my dorm room got lonely, when I missed my parents and my house
and my sister. I knit during the overcrowded dorm parties where I absolutely
did not fit in. I knit and responded awkwardly to drunk college freshman asking
about my sweater. I scribbled notes no one else could understand, decorated
composition notebooks on the couch in the dorm lounge. I became the creative
girl filled with potential, the one I always aspired to be.
I
am living my truth and I don’t hold back. I cry if I need to and I don’t hide
behind false smiles and fake friends. To live authentically may be terrifying,
but I have made it this far. I am done with the secrets, with the stigma and
the silence. It took too long to speak up, but I decided to be silent no longer.
I chose to live my truth in a culture full of lies, to live the open and
unapologetic truth in a town of carefully veiled secrets. I am living in
strength, in truth, and in love. I am done hiding. I am living my truth. I
am living my life. I am living.
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