Pulling into the station

January 27, 2004

In class last night, we discussed personal hells: how we descend into them and rise out of them. I feel like I�m making my decent back into hell again.

A few years ago (try 12), my parents and I moved in with my dad�s parents. I started a whole new life in a new city, a new school, even new hair. I love my grandparents, don�t get me wrong, but they could be very cruel. I was emotionally abused, basically, from day one. Of course, it wasn�t intentional � that�s just how things were back when they were growing up. Tell it like it is. My parents worked full time, so they didn�t really hear any of the criticism I was handed daily. I started having a very skewed view of myself. From watching any talk show, you know that self-visualization in a warped manner leads to some serious illnesses. I stopped eating. What I did eat, I�d vomit back up. Looking back at pictures of myself from that time� How did my parents not notice? When I say that my legs were as thin as my arms, I�m not joking. I was sick and no one was helping.

By the beginning of my sophomore year in high school, I�d started seeing Jose on again off again. He was one of the few people who took notice of my lack of eating and physically threw me up against a locker. He threatened to call CPS on my parents for neglect and abuse (which would have worked, I would have been taken away and placed in the custody of my uncle in Alameda). Scared shitless, I started eating again. While my body was getting the physical nourishment it needed, my mind was still messed up.

Then things went from bad to worse. My parents split up, I found out that my dad had been having an affair for years, and my grandpa died. My mom and I did a midnight run � moving out in the dark of night without saying anything to my grandparents (this was right before Grandpa died).

I started going across to the park, cutting class in the process, to smoke pot and cigarettes, and to get drunk. My grades started to suffer and my mom got mad. She thought I was rebelling against her and my dad because of their split, so she sent me to a shrink. I hated going. I didn�t want to participate in therapy, so I just sat there, stared at the wall until my time was up and got the hell out of that dreary office.

I was also stashing away pills. I took anything I could get my hands on. On more than one occasion, I found myself sitting on the bathroom floor, having taken a cocktail of pills that probably should have killed me within the hour � holding more that would certainly seal the deal. I vomited the pills back up before they did anything lethal. Did my folks ever know that I tried no less than four times to kill myself by pills alone? Or that I tried to walk out into traffic so that someone would hit me? Or that I had to throw away a pack of razors because they didn�t cut deep enough for me to slit my wrists?

At some point, though, I snapped out of it � the clouds lifted and I could behave like a normal human again. I flushed the last of the pills, I used crosswalks. I finished off junior and senior years with only one therapy session and one suicide attempt in that whole time. So I�ve been pretty good for the past, what, 8 years?

Until now.

It�s like watching a movie that you�ve seen before. You just know that she�s going to get on the bus and that it�s going to crash. But no matter how loud you yell, she can�t hear you warning her to take the train instead. I can see what�s happening to me � I know where I�m headed � but I can�t do anything about it. I�m screaming at me from the inside and I can�t hear me.

Welcome to my hell.

This is my personal hell stopped here at 10:58 p.m.

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