The first thing you should know about me is I am not a success story. Nor will I ever be one. From this you can probably glean that I am also a die hard pessimist, but more on that later. I am not a success story because I have never been successful at anything. I mean we are talking extreme unsuccessfulness. Once, in the 5th grade I was playing basketball for the YMCA and I scored a basket for the other team. I once went a whole year going to violin lessons through my elementary school and never learned how to play-I just faked it. I've always been an average student. I have a crippling fear of tests and being tested. To say I have never won something is an understatement. The only thing I can remember winning is a "#1 Horse Lover" award in the 4th grade but everyone got some "award" based on their hobbies and interests. It's funny too because I was raised by winners. Don't get me wrong, my parents are pretty cool and were not the type of parents to force me to do anything and didn't make me feel like shit for being such a loser. They accepted it. However, their first born was a real champion so they already had their winner child and I was destined to be the "quirky" one. For a while being the quirky one was a role that I more than obligingly filled. I have a really bad memory (like some sort of head trauma that I cant remember...) so all of the ages are guesstimated but it was about 8th grade when I started to turn to the "dark side". I just remember being so dissatisfied with life and with myself that it became physically painful. I decided that Kurt Cobain was my idol, that black eyeliner looked best in thick lines and obsessing over my weight was my new favorite past time. Oh and I developed incapacitating anxiety.
I did have quite a few friends but mostly because no one that age realized how harmful self-deprecating humor was so they just thought I was the funny, "weird" girl. I had two best friends who were just as weird but in slightly different ways. I was convinced I was fat (looking back this is kind of hilarious in a not-funny-at-all kind of way) so I started throwing up my food. I wanted to be anorexic and I told my best friends this (HA!) but I couldn't pull it off. So I figured I would get the best of both worlds- eat my cake and have it too! I would binge eat and then purge it. I hated purging but I felt like it was a good punishment for eating like an asshole, so I did it. This is when my horrible relationship with food began and boy do I love suffering the repercussions! I still look at food with an obsessive eye. I want food more than anything. It's a constant battle (that I am losing, if you couldn't tell).
I didn't start seeing a therapist until the 9th grade (I think) but I had a nice foray into that world when I had scared my best friends one too many times. I wrote them a note (OMG do you think Ryan thinks I am cute?!?!-because middle school amiright?) saying I wanted to hurt myself, or something like that. Next thing I know I'm in the counselors office and shes saying she "found this note" on the floor and that she wants to know if that's really how I felt. It's kind of adorable how naive I was because I really did think she found it on the floor. It was way too many years later that I realized my friends had turned it in (GASP).
In the 9th grade we moved to a new town. You know when, say a plate, is sitting on the edge of a counter and its juuuuuust about to fall and it sways for a few seconds and you're sitting there frozen, incapable of grabbing it before it shatters to pieces? Yeah that's what happened when we moved. My extremely tenuous grip on reality went tumbling down and shattered all over the floor. I was too much of an anxious wreck to act out in conventional ways (i.e skipping school, graffiti, screwing boys, drinking-you've seen the movies) so I decided I was just going to go to school and keep my mouth shut. I wasn't going to make friends (who needs them anyway? says the angst ridden teenager). I began wearing more black and stacking those black rubber bracelets because I was cool. No one approached me and boy was I petrified my first day of school. If it were physically possibly I think I would have choked on my own heart.
Anyway, fast-forward a few weeks or a few months? And I'm standing outside the school waiting for my mom to come pick me up (oh freshmen year...) listening to my Walkman (oh early 2000's) when this girl Molly from my English class asked me what I was listening to (Linkin Park because, duh). We became friends and it was good.
I can't remember exactly when, how or why but I started cutting that year. I could tell you some bullshit about making the pain I feel on the inside more real by showing it one the outside or some crap like that but the honest to god truth is I don't know why I did it. Attention, maybe? Not sure.I should have probably figured the "why" out. But I don't think I ever did. Anyway, it was fairly easy to conceal. Molly knew and my friend Lauren knew but she did it too so it wasn't a huge thing. Back then I was seeing a chiropractor weekly and one day she had me take off my hoodie, which therefore left my wrists wide open for viewing. She asked me what happened and I just completely blanked. I told her I slipped and fell during swim practice and obviously she didn't fall for that. I was convinced that she was going to tell my mom so I was throwing up in my head with anxiety for the rest of the day because I didn't know what to do. That night I called my mom into my bedroom and had her sit on the bed and I showed her my arms. I just remember she seemed really mad. And I cried. Skip a couple weeks and the next thing I know I'm in the most stereotypical psychiatrists room to ever exist outside of movie sets. I don't remember his name and every time I try to remember what he looked like I just think of the actor who played the dad in the movie Juno, J.K Simmons. My mom was in the room for the beginning but he started asking me increasingly mortifying questions and I finally asked her if she could leave after he asked if I was suicidal. I told him I had thought about it, tossed around the idea, like no big deal. But I had done more than that. I had written many notes, and made many plans. Sometimes to this day I wish I would have done it. We talked about how imperfect I was and how I wanted to be someone else. I told him about my binging and purging, and he told me that when we binge our body releases endorphin's so that's why I felt good after it. This fact actually still fascinates me to this day. I saw him pretty regularly. I acted like I didn't want to but secretly I enjoyed it. It was nice to have an unbiased person to talk to. Someone that didn't have any stake in my life so they weren't prone to crying when I told them my deepest most fucked up thoughts. He told me I had Borderline Personality Disorder and Severe Depression (because, duh). I taught him what a loofa was so I think it was a fair trade, really.
(To be continued...)
