Friday 11 March 2011

Waking Up

My name is Julia; I’m fifteen, a sophomore at Ford view High School. My life isn’t so bad really, I’ve got good friends, my family and I get along alright I guess, I’ve never been bullied or traumatized. But, here I am writing my story from a tiny ten by ten room, one window, one door and one sad looking hospital bed that will be where I sleep for the next few weeks until I’m discharged from this hell. Psycho ward, wacky shack, Looney bin, whatever you call it, I’m here, welcome to Baltimore Mental Health Center. It’s not all bad I guess, the food sucks, the therapy sucks even worse, but the people excuse me, the patients are pretty decent.  We’ve got a few meth heads, a depressed kid (or five), the completely aliens-are-invading crazy ones, and then there’s the kids like me. We’re people you see every day, we’re the one in your math class, your bio partner in science, maybe even your best friend. Come to think of it, we are the last people you’d expect to be miserable, miserable enough to swallow that last pills, cut just a little deeper, toe the edge of that bridge, wondering just how long it will take for you to reach that place of eternal bliss, the one where when you close your eyes, you never wake up. Yeah I’m talking about the big S. Suicide.
            It doesn’t seem so crazy to me, wanted to escape the pain, the stress, the exhaustion of life. It’s really not worth all the trouble to work your butt off for sixty years and then just die, if you think about it, but then again, I am the one in the wacky shack, why would anyone trust my word?
So, you’re probably wondering why, exactly I decided to try and wipe myself off the face of the earth. Well, you see, I have this little thing people like to call bipolar disorder, basically meaning, I’m happy one minute, crazy depressed the next, two different people, at home in one body. Yup, that’s me.
It wasn’t always like this, well for me at least, you have to wonder about some of the other people hear, for most of my life I was a relatively happy girl. I played sports, I went out with friends, I was normal. I was fine, I was living.
All of that changed nearing the end of freshman year, I went from, moderately messed up teenager and crash landed into depression. Hard. If you’ve ever been depressed you know that it just eats away at you. And it did until I was nothing more than a shadow of my old self. Yeah, I guess my friends noticed, I was more distant, stopped eating, stopped going anywhere but back to sleep. I want to say they cared, that they were sad to see me like that, but my bipolar brain tells me that they just didn’t give one damn. I don’t blame them, after all, who want to hang out with someone like me, the messed up depressed chick? My family was the same way, focusing all their attention on my angel of a little sister while I stayed holed up in my room all day, journaling, and sleeping and doing whatever else. I didn’t want to see them, I didn’t want to see anyone, I hated that they were happy when I wasn’t. I’m a fifteen year old girl for crying out loud, I’m supposed to be at parties, sleep over’s, talking about cute boys, not holed up in my room brooding. I was miserable, I still am, but at least here, I’m able to get through my day stoned on lithium and ativan. Yeah what a life, instead of living check to check, I live pill to pill, ha, kind of funny if you think about it. Well anyways, I don’t remember exactly when it was, the day that that faithful idea popped into my brain, but I do remember it was one of those times where nothing could curb my pain, I was hyper, I was energized, I was manic. The funny thing about your mood swinging from one extreme to the other, you look for a constant, something to ground you, I had been using journaling, but now that I had this idea, I not only had a constant to hang on to, but I had a solution to my problems and my family’s problems. I was going to kill myself. Suicide is a hard concept to grasp. When your mind finally hatches the idea, it seems so unreal; fragile even, something that will never actually happen. So then you begin to form a plan, how will you do it? When? Will you write a note saying goodbye or just leave this world without a trace?  Suddenly, you find that it consumes your every waking thought. Walking to class you will wonder what way is least painful, during class you will wonder if you want it to hurt, after class you will decide to write a suicide note to your sister telling her everything’s alright, that your happy and chillen with Jesus somewhere in heaven. Imagine this every day. An obsession, a comfort, a constant that you crave in your life, it was the perfect solution. And I had the perfect plan, and all I needed was a bottle of Tylenol, easily pilfered from our unlocked medicine cabinet. Now, I just needed to decide on a day. Not a Monday, that would be too hard on my family, they’d have to be sad the whole rest of the week, I’m thinking a Thursday, that way my little sister can get her homework on Friday before she stays out of school to grieve for a week or two. Perfect.
That night, I can’t even remember the whole thing, but I do remember the first part. I had come home from school, cooked dinner for my family and we all sat down like normal family for once,  I pushed down the little bit of chicken and rice I could to make my mom happy, she deserved to be happy that night, I guess you could say it was my way of making up for wat I was about to do. I even stayed up with my little sister and let her sleep in my bed until around 11 o’clock, when I carried her back to her room and snagged my salvation, a full bottle of acetaminophen, guaranteed to bring me down so low that nothing can hurt me ever again. Most people say that they cry or are sad when they make that final decision, to drop themselves down into the point of no return, not me, I had been waiting for this, waiting for days, weeks even, I had it all planned out and finally, I was going to be happy. My hands shaking, I tipped the bottle, an uncountable number of pills tumbled out and I placed them in my hand, grabbing the cup of tea beside my bed I began to down them, counting… one, two, three, four, five… it became a game, seven, eight, nine, ten, let’s see how much I can do before I pass out, eleven, twelve, thirteen, then by the handfuls, twenty, thirty, forty… I lost count, and everything faded to black.
When I first woke up, I thought it was a dream, because after all, I was dead. White, lots of white blobs swirled past me, I couldn’t move, it felt so weird, like my head was disconnected from my body. Voices echoed in my ear but I was able to understand nothing. All I felt was pain, lots of pain.
I drifted in and out of my body for a little while after that, it could’ve been two minutes or two days, I’m not sure, they never told me, but as soon as I had my mind intact I began to put two and two together, and by the time the next nurse came back to check my vitals, I realized that I was alive, I was going to be okay, and with that, I broke down in tears. The doctor came back and talked to me, Dr. Minerva I think it was, she was nice, too nice to me, I didn’t deserve niceness, and I deserved to be yelled at. I calmly pulled back my hair, and asked her when I was going home, but she just frowned at me. Soon enough, I figured it out, I wasn’t going home, not today, not tomorrow, I was going to take a short detour into the Baltimore Mental Health Center. So here I am, sitting cross-legged on a hospital bed and looking out of my tiny window at the people down below, I wonder if they’ve ever wanted nothing else but to die. I really wish I didn’t feel this way, truly I do, but no matter how much therapy or drugs try to alter my thinking, I know, in my heart that this will always be a part of who I am. My name is Julia, I’m 15, and I am suicidal.

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