When I first went into my college’s counseling center, I felt like I should have been wearing a trench coat and dark sunglasses. Good Christians did not need counseling. If ever there was a sign for “not having enough faith,” this was it. It took me five passes in front of the door before I was able to walk in. At the reception desk, I mumbled so badly that I had to repeat myself several times. “I have an appointment with K.”
In spite of everything I felt and the sudden understanding (vague though it was) of my nightmares, I still half expected to be told that I was fine, and only going through a brief adjustment to being away from home for the first time. Clearly, I was also delusional.
K interviewed me for a while, and asked if it was OK if she talked to my RA before our next session, which she insisted be the following day. She asked me about my family. I told her that my dad was an engineer, mom a former math teacher. My older brother was a senior at the same college, my younger brother in high school. My dad’s parents were still married, and his siblings had various mental illnesses and substance abuse problems. But, then again, they were not Christians. My mom’s parents were divorced. Her dad got re-married to a wonderful woman who is our family matriarch. Her mom became an alcoholic, moved in with a horrible man, and died of cancer and alcoholism when I was a child. I didn’t want to talk about it. K wanted to talk about little else. I said he was big, had blue eyes and pointy eyebrows. He smelled like cigarettes and stale beer. We don’t see him anymore, not since Grandma died. What’s the point? I asked.
When I saw K the next day, she didn’t take any more notes. She told me that I had Posttraumatic Stress Disorder from childhood abuse. I denied it, but knew she was right. She told me I needed more help than the school’s small center could offer, and suggested a Christian outpatient hospital. I didn’t want to go, but I also didn’t want to leave college and I couldn’t have both things. So I had to call my parents up and tell them the news so that they could work out the insurance. I can only imagine what a horrible phone call that was to receive. “Hi guys. Remember Grandma’s boyfriend? Well, he abused me and I’m crazy now and I have to go to a hospital. How was your day?”
New Life, the hospital, was supposed to be some mecca for Christian psychiatry. There were people from all over the country who came for treatment. Most of them were much older and being treated for depression. My counselor was a recent grad who believed the key to my healing lay in confronting my anger about the abuse. The only problem was, I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel much of anything. And I could hardly remember the abuse. In my second week there, a man named Pete joined the center. He was a recently released sexual assault offender. Perfect! My counselor must have thought. I’ll have Pete corner her and she’s bound to feel some anger. There was some anger, sure. There was also the sudden desire to kill myself the day Pete recited his history to the group. Mom had driven up and was staying in a near by hotel. That afternoon she pulled me out of the center and told them she’d be talking to a lawyer.
We packed up my belongings from the dorm that night and drove home. “You focus on getting better and you can come back in the Spring,” the dean of students assured me. It was the only hope I had to hold on to. I felt like I belonged there, that the only good friends I’d ever have in life were still in that dorm while I was being shoved out the back door in the middle of the night.
I got into regular therapy at home. I talked about my past. About the nightmares. About the cutting. It was all very sad, but the only thing I could every cry about was the fact I wasn’t at school. Everything else wasn’t real. I wasn’t accepted when I re-applied to school in the spring. I got a letter from the dean of students. “We want to make sure that you’ve had enough time to heal from this emotional period.” What I read was “We don’t want you to spread the crazy to the rest of the student body.”
A few nights later, I was in my bedroom. Everyone else was already asleep. The only light from outside the door (the door that was kept open at all times; same with the bathroom - for my own good) was the distant patio lamp. I felt very distant from myself; it’s hard to describe. I didn’t feel sad. I didn’t feel angry. I didn’t feel real. I couldn’t stand any more of the not feeling real. I wanted to be a person again. I wanted to be me again; the me I was before I went crazy. So I walked down the stairs into the kitchen. I saw my prescription bottles on top of the fridge. I reached up and I took the lids off all three of them and poured the contents into my hands. I studied them. They were different colors: peach, white, and yellow. Some were round, some were oblong. I counted them out. 98 in all.
Without a thought, I swallowed them in one handful. As soon as I did, my dad walked out of his bedroom for a drink of water. “Can’t sleep,” he asked. I felt my hands begin to tremble. Suddenly I wasn’t so sure that I had made a wise decision. I had never intended to die. Not really. I mean, if I wasn’t even real, how I could I die? “I didn’t mean to do it,” I whispered. Dad looked at the empty pill bottles on the counter.
I remember being in the car in the garage, on the way to the ER. I remember him fastening my seatbelt for me. I remember him saying “just hold on.” I remember being surprised that he was speeding. Dad never risked getting a ticket. I remember being strapped to a bed and having my stomach pumped. I remember feeling, still, like it was all a big show. Soon the director would step out from behind the camera and shout “cut!”
Instead, I stayed in ICU over night while they monitored my heart and liver. Then my psychologist put in a transfer to a hospital with a better psych ward. I stayed there, with my roommate who thought she was Elizabeth Taylor, for a week. I was released on my 18th birthday. My mom barely spoke to me for a week after that, but I hardly noticed at the time. I was a walking zombie.
It wasn’t until this past year that a professional told me that I was absolutely insane the night I swallowed those pills, and that it was a miracle I had ever come back. Most people, she said, who get that far detached, don’t make it back to reality. At the time, the doctors and therapists had said it was just another symptom of the PTSD, or that I was trying to tell them that their treatment was working. For some reason it made me feel so much better, even a decade later, to know what had really happened. And to realize that I’m very, very lucky to be alive today.
Let alone happy.
And while those things are a part of my life, they also aren’t. I’m a different person, now. Completely. It took years to get to where I am, but I’m not sure that I would trade my experiences for a happy past. I like who I turned into. I like the empathy and understanding I gained, and who’s to say I’d be the same if I had just stayed at school, happily singing praise songs and judging people with problems bigger than themselves. I also love that I found a way to reconcile my own personal faith from the generic Praise Jesus Christianity I was so ensconced in. I’m proud of myself for choosing life and love over all the hate I went through.
Technorati Tags: 101 Things/1001 Days, Crazy, Abuse, PTSD, Suicide
