Thirteen
When I was thirteen, nothing could faze me. I grew up in sunny Southern California in an upper-middle-class neighborhood near the ocean. My parents separated before I came into this world and were divorced before I’d seen six months. However, both parents loved me and my two older brothers very much, and my father tried to see us as often as he could. I was the baby girl, the “sweetie pie” whom everyone fawned over. I had a television, a computer, and my own phone line all in the comfort of my bedroom. I was bright and talented and had recently been accepted into the gifted program at my middle school. No one could deny me anything.
I never considered myself spoiled. I was level-headed and practical. I never asked for expensive things or copped an attitude. I was a sensitive and empathetic child, a budding environmentalist and poet. When I finally received the one thing I found myself begging for, a dog, I took great care of her and acted as responsibly as I had promised. I never threw tantrums or called people ugly names. I was never asked to wash the dishes or set the table, but when I was feeling bored I would do these things for the inevitable praise I would receive.
Anyone could see there was something wrong with me.
The wrongness became blatant that fateful year of thirteen. My poetry, though impressive, was disturbing in content. I was obsessed with pain, death, and suffering. My work was spattered with blood, hollowed out with loneliness, and soaked in tears. No one asked me about it, though. There were compliments all around and perhaps a few uneasy smiles, but, essentially, good writing was good writing and poetic content was not to be taken seriously. I evolved to writing frightening notes to my peers. In these letters I revealed my contemplations of suicide and my desire to hurt myself. Some friends stopped speaking to me, others tried to help, and one girl incurred my wrath by reporting me to the school counselor.
One would think that a middle school counselor would be well versed in depression, however mine disproved this theory. She talked to me about my life at home and at school and once she was relatively convinced I wasn’t being beaten by my mom, molested by my brothers, or harassed by my peers, she sent me on my way. Without obvious, external causes, apparently one could not truly be depressed.
I saw my counselor irregularly over the next few weeks, just to “check in”. She never had anything useful to say and as long as no life-altering traumas were taking place she was satisfied. Then one day a classmate walked in on me in the bathroom. At first glance she seemed utterly confused by what I was doing. I froze, the sharp end of a pin poised centimeters above the soft flesh below my wrist. With her body bracing the heavy door, she looked from the pin to the scratches on my arm and suddenly comprehended the inconceivable. She fled from the bathroom straight to the nurse’s office.
This time I had earned a call home; this type of odd behavior was entirely unacceptable. Lucky, loved, and well moneyed La Jollan girls simply did not act this way.
When my mother picked me up, she was at a loss. She was frigid, cold, and distant. Finally, she inhaled sharply.
“What do we do now?” she asked, as if I had expertise in this area of parenting.
“Nothing,” I told her, “It’s not a big deal. Everyone is just overreacting.” My mother wanted so badly, needed so badly, to believe this that she did. We continued in deadly silence.
For a few weeks I managed to stay out of the counselor’s office, but did not cease to cause trouble. I began calling friends and threatening suicide, or worse, making them listen to my cries of agony as I tore at my skin. My closest friends stayed up all night just to talk me out of doing something “stupid”. They were becoming as traumatized as I was. Some mornings, especially after a full night of threats and cuts, I told my mother I didn’t feel like going to school because I simply could not get out of bed. She declared me “sick” and allowed me to stay home, never considering what such a condition could mean. There was no fever, no cough, no aches and pains, save the ones I’d caused myself. There was only a deep-seated misery that pinned me to the spot, that caused my muscles to defy my brain. My limbs had lost all will to perform and my heart all will to pump blood into my veins.
Everyone wanted to know why. Why do you want to die? Why are you so depressed? Why are you hurting yourself? I had no answers. So I made them up. I made up all kinds of stories about the traumas I had been through that made me turn out the way I did. I borrowed the lies from the scenarios my counselor expected me to recount. I told people terrible things; my parents abused me, I was sexually molested, my best friend was killed. I had no remorse for these lies because they seemed so justified. I told them enough times to begin believing them. There had to be a reason I felt so terrible – why not this?
In fact, the traumas I experienced were yet to happen, a product of the mental illnesses I was trying to explain away. A manic compulsion drove me to party hardy at a fraternity when I was still thirteen. Another time I decided to go rock climbing – without a harness. At fifteen I walked around Vegas in the middle of the night, drunk, and unattended. The night would end with my best friend applying foundation in order to hide the terrible bruises. I got myself into horrifying situations that culminated in an added diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. But at the time I felt nothing. The mania would fade and the depression would set in. And it wasn’t a sadness. It was a sick, slow apathy that dragged me through my daily routines.
My games ended with an essay I wrote. An unstable eighth grade English teacher convinced me to write an essay based on the quote “He that best understands the world, least likes it.” She coerced me into writing everything that was going on inside my mind, everything I couldn’t understand; everything that was tearing me apart. I did. While she read it, the whole class watched in patient silence. We watched her face change; her knowing smile, her sympathetic eyes. By the time she finished the piece, she was in tears. She asked me to read it to the class
“This is something they all should hear” she told me.
So I read it. I tried to stop trembling; I tried not to cry. I just laid it out there for all my fellow thirteen-year-olds to see. I spoke of fates worse than death, of pain beyond human capacity. I spoke of voices in my head and visions in my sleep. When I finished there were tears and applause. There were blank stares. And at that moment, my teacher did the strangest thing. She snatched the essay right out of my hands and ran from the room.
We chatted amongst ourselves in our confusion. No one felt much like messing around the way we normally would if left unsupervised. Soon after, my teacher returned with the inadequate counselor I knew so well. They motioned for me to come with them, and I walked out of the classroom for the very last time.
The next three days swept through my life like a hurricane. I was immediately suspended. The cause, as it was explained to me, was endangering my fellow students with inflammatory speech. I was stunned.
“My teacher told me to read it to the class!” I demanded, but the counselor was already bothering my mother at work. I finally began to cry, not because I was suspended or confused, but because I knew my mother would be absolutely furious. She didn’t appreciate inconvenience.
My mother came and the situation was explained to her without my being present. I suspected they were telling her lies, for why else would I not be allowed to hear? When she came out she looked like she had completely unraveled. The counselor sat us down and let me in on the verdict.
“Until a doctor evaluates you and tells us you’re ready to come back to school, you are not allowed to be here.”
I didn’t argue, and neither did my mom. We collected what little dignity we had left and walked out the door. We were upset, confused, and insulted. We couldn’t work up the courage to put two words together on the ride home. Later, when I overheard my mother place a call to my father, a man she took great pains to avoid, I knew she was desperate.
The first reaction I understood from Team Parents was understandable rage at my teacher.
“How could she let her read that to the class!?” my mom barked at my father.
“She shouldn’t have done it” my gentle father consented.
“Can we sue her? I mean this is ridiculous!”
My father promised he’d look into it, but tried to bring the topic back to what was most important: their daughter.
The next few weeks were a jumble of Picasso proportions. The decision was finally made, by a group of professionals who barely knew me, that the best thing was to enroll me in a Partial-Day Hospital Program. This consisted of hospitalization at the mental health facility where I would spend the day from 9am until 5pm. I could sleep at home in my own bed and would get the weekends off. The program was one of intensive therapy where different methods were used throughout the day. As long as I seemed to pose no serious threat I would be allowed to go home every night.
Miserable as I was, and curious, I was open to this suggestion. The following Monday my mother and father (as demanded by the hospital staff) both arrived to check me in. We went through the orientation process and discussed family therapy as well as individual therapy for me. As scary as it was, I could handle it. My parents hugged me goodbye and I was led to the adolescent ward.
Nothing in my upper-middle-class, sunny Southern Californian, spoiled life could have prepared me for what I saw there. I was put in a therapy room with a group of people of varieties I had never seen. There was a gang member from the Chicano ghetto, various drug addicts, a teen mother with long sharp nails and a deadly glare. They looked me up and down like the little rich white bitch I was. I burst into tears.
“You’re going to have to calm down” the psychologist told me sternly, “crying is all right, but you cannot get hysterical.” I cried harder, burying my head in my hands.
“If you don’t stop this right now” he demanded in an even sterner tone, “I am going to have to take you to solitary confinement.” Those two words, words I’d only heard in relation to jails and horrible, criminal prisoners made me fall to my knees. The psychologist and a nurse grabbed me up by the arms and removed me from the room. I was taken to solitary confinement, a disturbing and suffocating little room painted with rainbows and happy faces.
“You can stay in here until you calm down” he told me “If you absolutely cannot we will give you a sedative.” He shut the door and I told myself I had to be brave.
“It’s just one day” I told myself, “as soon as my parents hear how I’m being treated here they’ll never make me come back.” I took a deep breath and sucked it up. When the psychologist returned in fifteen minutes I was rational enough to return to the group.
I survived the rest of the day solely on the belief that it would be my last in this hellhole. I listened with fascination to the horrible lives experienced by those around me. One girl was born a crystal addict and was abandoned by her mother. The gang member recounted horrible tales of the murders he’d witnessed. I felt like I was watching a TV drama, and all I could tell myself was, ‘I don’t belong here. I’m not one of them.’
I couldn’t have been more relieved when my mom and dad showed up to take me home after the first day. The three of us were walking to the parking lot, the two parents at a considerable distance from one another, when I announced I was never going back.
“You wouldn’t believe the way they treated me!” I told them, anticipating their horror as I recounted the events of the day.
“So you can see, I just don’t belong here.” I concluded with the sound belief that my parents would agree. They had never denied me anything in my life, and I had never asked for much. My parents looked hard at one another. My mother may have been the sterner, harsher one, but my father was the stronger.
“I’m sorry” he said “You don’t have any choice.” I thought he was trying to play a role, reading some script he’d been handed. I was “daddy’s little girl”. I didn’t live with him growing up and he coveted my time and love more than anything. Words like these just didn’t make sense coming from his lips.
“Didn’t you hear what I said!?” I cried, “They’re horrible to me!” But my father stood his ground, as hard as it must have been. I pleaded and cried and soon I became desperate. I felt as though I was fighting for my life. I was convinced that if they forced me to stay in this hospital, I would die. Suddenly, all the horrible epithets that I had never dared spit out in all my teen years vomited from my throat.
“You’re ruining my life!” I screamed “You don’t love me! If you loved me you would never do this to me! How can you do this to me!?” As I screamed I pounded my fists on the car, then on the asphalt. I was causing a scene and I didn’t care. My mother looked uncomfortable and horrified, my father sympathetic. I choked on my sobs as I threw the most exquisite tantrum in the parking lot, for all to see. My father tried to help me up.
“Don’t touch me!” I shrieked, “Don’t you fucking touch me!” I could not believe my entire life had fallen apart in one instant. Nothing was what I thought it was. Were these really my parents? Was this the father that bought me an overpriced, collectable doll simply because I mentioned it was pretty? Was this the mother who tucked me in every night with the question “Who loves you the most?” I didn’t know who they were. I didn’t know who I was. My life was completely unrecognizable to me and for the first time ever in my comfortable life, I was truly scared.
I didn’t speak to anyone that night. I closed myself up in my room in a dark silence. I could only think thoughts that were so enigmatic and puzzling that there were simply no words for them. I unplugged the phone and ignored any knocking on my bedroom door. I wanted to be alone in the darkness, to try to concoct some sort of plan to get me through this. I had never failed to do so in the past. I could lie my way out of almost any trouble with parents or school, I could pull off a decent grade without studying by quickly memorizing key points before a quiz. There was nothing I couldn’t get away with or fix or work through. Until now.
The next morning I emerged, ready to face another day at the hospital. I had a plan. We drove the fifteen miles in silence and I walked through the double doors without a word of goodbye to my traitorous mother. I didn’t cry a single tear that day. I introduced myself to the group and told them what I had been admitted for. They introduced themselves to me in the fashion common to all mental health and drug rehab facilities:
My name is ______ and I’m here because ________
In group therapy I offered up the best advice I could think of. I was smart, better educated than most of my hospital-mates, and I came up with solutions that seemed ingenious to them. The staff was impressed. I was forthcoming with my own problems and discussed the many insights I had to their roots. The psychologist was pleased with the incredible and remarkably swift change in my attitude. I was playing their game. And I was winning.
I kept up the good work for two weeks, sure that I would be released soon for “good behavior”. The doctor in charge of my “case” as they called it, called me into his office after the second week had ended.
“I’m very impressed with the work you’re doing here” he said.
“Does that mean I can go home?”
“Not yet” he told me, “apparently one of the nurses thinks you’re not doing the kind of work you should be. You’re incredibly intelligent and you’re using your smarts to play the system. I’m inclined to agree. I don’t think we’ve really gotten to the core of your issues and until you stop giving everyone what they want we aren’t going to.” I was vindictive. For the first time I noticed my doctor looked a lot like an elf with a shiny bald head. I told my hospital-mates just that when they asked how the meeting went.
I was very popular in the hospital. I had gotten really close to the other patients and began to feel more like them and less like the rest of the world. Some would joke about the “solidarity of mental patients”, but soon you’re more “mental patient” than “eighth grader” or “teenager” or even “human being”. I knew I had to open up the way everyone else was, but I just didn’t know how to be that raw. I didn’t know how to be real.
One day, during Recreational Therapy, one of my fellow patients did an amazing thing. It was our resident gang banger. We had all been given Lego’s and were asked to construct something representative of ourselves. I don’t remember what I built. I don’t remember what the girl next to me built. All I can remember was what Gang Member built. Soon everyone’s attention was off their own creations and on GM who was furiously building a giant tower of Lego’s. After a feverish bout of construction he took one final Lego and placed it behind the tower.
“Since everyone is so interested in your work, why don’t we start with you?” the therapist said to GM. His explanation was simple. He laid his hands flat on the table in front of the Lego tower.
“This is everybody” he said. He pointed to the tower “This is a wall.” Then, picking up the solitary Lego on the other side he declared “This is me.”
Silence. No one knew what to say to such a simplistic and yet so poignant explanation. GM had never opened up like this before. He looked like he might cry, if he could. His face was twisted into an indignant snarl, challenging us to question his pain. After an endless period of absorbing the intensity in the air, the counselor concluded
“I think we learned something very important about you today.”
The next few weeks were the most humbling of my life. I learned that suffering was not a comparable entity. My suffering was the same as everyone else’s. I met people who had the same types of visions and heard the same types of voices. I met people who told the same sorts of lies and made the same self-destructive decisions. I became many people’s lifeline, and they, unknowingly, mine.
One day, a sharp-edged nurse who had a reputation for turning hard-assed druggies into sentimental family members, dropped a thick packet on the table in front of me.
“This is you” she told me.
I looked at the title – “King Baby”. I was apprehensive. I opened the packet and began to read.
I took the packet home and could not decide what to make of it. I was enraged. Essentially, the King Baby was someone who always got what they wanted, and when they didn’t, they manipulated others into getting it for them. The King Baby was desperate to be in control of everything and everyone. At first glance I was appalled. ‘I have never demanded anything from anyone!’ But I read on and learned what “manipulation” and a “need to control” really meant.
My very belief that, if given enough time to concoct a plan, I could dance right through this program was a need to control.
My tantrum in the parking lot, resorting to questioning my parents love for me, was a need to control.
My desire to cause myself physical pain, in order to make tangible those inexplicable thoughts I could not escape, was a need to control.
It became apparent to me that you could be the sweet, well loved girl I was and be a conniving manipulative control freak at the same time. And I was.
The packet offered an explanation for this behavior that I found entirely unacceptable. In a nutshell, the damn thing called me spoiled. That was a lie! I grew up among the richest, most prominent teenagers in the area – boys and girls that owned expensive cars before they were old enough to drive, kids that spent afternoons at the country club, wiping their asses with hundred-dollar bills. I wasn’t like them. We didn’t have that kind of money. I was down to earth. I didn’t get new clothes for each changing fashion trend; I didn’t buy the latest CDs. They were the spoiled ones, not me.
The next day the serrated nurse asked me what I thought of the packet. I became indignant. I strung together the most impressive sounding words I could think of into the most logical sounding argument in order to disprove her wayward theory. I had to have been talking for a good ten minutes when she stopped me.
“Are you listening to yourself? You’re doing it again. No matter what you say, my opinion isn’t going to change. Who are you trying to convince anyway?”
I thought about it. I looked at my written outline of the speech I had prepared for this moment and suddenly felt ridiculous. I had told myself from the very beginning that I didn’t belong here and though I had stopped chanting the mantra I still believed it. Though I would never admit that I was capable of such cruelty and snobbery, I had always thought since I was better educated and came from a good home I could walk away while they remained in the rehab facilities they were destined to inhabit. I was a bitch. The kind of bitch I took pride in not being. I was the liberal one, the humanist, the one empathetic La Jollan of the bunch! In reality, I was a lot more like them than I had ever been forced to admit.
When I was thirteen, everything changed me. I grew up in sunny Southern California in an upper-middle-class neighborhood near the ocean. My parents worked together, against their personal feelings, and tried to help me live a healthy life. I was still the baby girl, the “sweetie pie” whom everyone fawned over. My television, my computer, my dog, and my own phone line were waiting for me when I returned home. I was bright and talented and had recently been accepted into the Partial-Day Hospital Program to thrive amongst the strongest most exceptional people in the world. I couldn’t deny myself anything.