PostHope: A Place for Inspiration

Hello Recovery Writers!

It has been awhile, I know! But when I came across this site recently I had make WfR a part of it. Here I want to announce the opening of an adjunct site to the Writing for Recovery blog: It is called PostHope, and MY hope is that is will be a place for recovery inspiration. Please read the introduction from the PH site:

This is going to be a place where I hope (!) people will post some of their successes in battling the things we talk about on WfR: addiction, PTSD, eating disorders, sexual and domestic violence, self-harm, mental illness, and other issues. I would love to hear your stories of triumph, your progress, even the smallest of victories. Whether you’ve recovered completely, are in the process, or just had a moment where you decided not to use a self-defeating behavior, this is the site where I want to hear those inspiring tales. I believe sharing these things will give people hope that full recovery is possible!! So please feel free to post your own personal successes, those of your friends, or anything else that inspires you: quotes, photos, etc. 

Thank you for visiting this new little project. I hope you it gives YOU hope!

You can find the new site here at  http://www.posthope.com/writingforrecovery

I look forward to seeing you there! Peace, Sarah

We Should Have Heard You: Ashley Billasano’s Final Words Uncut

Ashley Billasano was a girl just like me. So much like me, that this story has affected me in a deeper way than perhaps it would have otherwise. Ashley and I both grew up in the Austin area. We both were sexually abused by our fathers, raped other times, and used eating disorders and self-harm to cope with this. Both of us were failed by Travis County Child Protective Services, who neither served nor protected us. We both attempted suicide more than once. 

The difference is, I survived.

Eventually, someone heard me. Eventually, I received the help I so desperately needed. Tragically, no one heard Ashley or was able to help her before she succeeded in taking her own life. I can’t explain why I was spared and Ashley wasn’t. I can’t explain why someone intervened on my behalf and no one got to her in time. And I can’t imagine how Ashley’s friends and family are feeling right now.

But I can imagine what Ashley was feeling. I remember vividly what it felt like to think that no one believed me and no one was going to help me and I was all alone with my hellish pain. Ashley left us with a record of her pain, a record of her experiences and reasons for taking her life. She made it public for a reason. And when I heard that Twitter took those messages down I was angry, because she wasn’t heard when she was alive. She deserves to be heard now. So I am publishing her tweets just as she wrote them, unedited and uncut. Ashley wanted the world to know what she went through and she wrote it rather eloquently. Perhaps her writing will encourage other survivors to come forward with their own stories. There have been far too many deaths due to silence. Let us remember Ashley Billasano and how the system did not work for her. Let us do better the next time a victim has the courage to report. Please, let us  do better. 

A website and foundation have been set up in Ashley’s honor, their mission to help victims of abuse deal with the effects and prevent more tragic suicides. www.ashleymariejustbreathe.com

 

10:50PM Nov 6th: “I fuckked up my own suicide” yeah tell me about it…

6:44AM Nov 7th: Staying home today. Can I reach 1000 tweets??? I’m thinking yes!

9:45AM Nov 7th: just woke up

9:45AM Nov 7th: Don’t feel too well

9:45AM Nov 7th: There is somebody in my dreams

9:46AM Nov 7th: I want them gone

9:46AM Nov 7th: How can we control our dreams?

9:46AM Nov 7th: Hummm wish somebody would text me

9:47AM Nov 7th: Kinda lonely right now

9:47AM Nov 7th: There was so much more I wanted to do

9:48AM Nov 7th: Ahhh well time to move on

9:48AM Nov 7th: My thought process is too crazy

9:48AM Nov 7th: I totally think I’m bipolar

9:49AM Nov 7th: Or just crazy

9:49AM Nov 7th: Idk.

9:49AM Nov 7th: Humm I remember why we broke up

9:50AM Nov 7th: I shall do it again

9:50AM Nov 7th: Because this time I don’t have a bf

9:50AM Nov 7th: And I really don’t care anymore

9:51AM Nov 7th: I should get ready then

9:51AM Nov 7th: Should have gotten everything last night

9:52AM Nov 7th: Still just trying to raise my numbers

9:52AM Nov 7th: So I met this boy

9:52AM Nov 7th: He was very cute you see

9:52AM Nov 7th: Quite popular too

9:53AM Nov 7th: Me and this boy started talking

9:53AM Nov 7th: Then we talked a lil more

9:53AM Nov 7th: Then he let me in his front door

9:54AM Nov 7th: We walked up the stairs where everything was quite

9:54AM Nov 7th: And he whispered ‘you look beautiful’ into my ear

9:55AM Nov 7th: Shivers moved down my spine

9:55AM Nov 7th: And then he began to kiss my neck

9:56AM Nov 7th: I know you’re thinking ‘why did she go’

9:57AM Nov 7th: And all I can say is my father told me so

9:57AM Nov 7th: So he kissed me sweet and laid me down on his bed

9:58AM Nov 7th: I started to shake he said ‘give me head’

9:58AM Nov 7th: I laughed at him and said ‘I’m a vegetarian’

9:59AM Nov 7th: Then I wondered why I had really come to him.

9:59AM Nov 7th: See I’ve been in this situation before

10:00AM Nov 7th: When a boy I loved said he would leave if I didn’t give it up

10:00AM Nov 7th: And I told my friends I had done it even though it wasn’t true

10:01AM Nov 7th: Because he was telling everybody the same things too

10:01AM Nov 7th: But here is the honest truth

10:01AM Nov 7th: I never did it till I was sixteen

10:02AM Nov 7th: I did not know the boy

10:02AM Nov 7th: And I never got to know him

10:02AM Nov 7th: He was older stronger and high at the time

10:03AM Nov 7th: He probably will never admit I was a crime

10:03AM Nov 7th: His breath smelt sour like smoke and his kisses became rough

10:04AM Nov 7th: Then I tried to sit up and say ‘I’ve had enough’

10:04AM Nov 7th: My attempt of getting free were feeble

10:05AM Nov 7th: I decided to scream ‘please stop’

10:05AM Nov 7th: but he just took a pillow to my face and put me in the dark

10:06AM Nov 7th: First to go were my shoes. I feel my feet go cold

10:06AM Nov 7th: Next my pants, he was so bold.

10:07AM Nov 7th: It hurt so much as he entered me

10:07AM Nov 7th: Guys I’m telling you my first time was taken from me

10:08AM Nov 7th: He noticed and said ‘are you a virgin?’

10:08AM Nov 7th: I nodded through tears as he kept barging in

10:09AM Nov 7th: He finished and was done with me

10:09AM Nov 7th: I lay on his bed lifeless

10:10AM Nov 7th: He let me stay there and sleep

10:10AM Nov 7th: Then he offered me some weed

10:10AM Nov 7th: I said ‘no thank you I don’t do that either’

10:11AM Nov 7th: He said ‘girl you’re no fun. See you later’

10:12AM Nov 7th: I started to get dressed and he came back in

10:12AM Nov 7th: He came close; i tried to get away from him

10:12AM Nov 7th: He told me ‘dont be scared’

10:13AM Nov 7th: and like an idiot I believed him

10:13AM Nov 7th: He asked if I liked it

10:14AM Nov 7th: I shrugged my shoulders

10:14AM Nov 7th: He leaned in for a kiss, and I let him

10:15AM Nov 7th: He laid me down and rubbed my back

10:15AM Nov 7th: I cried in his pillow. He cried back

10:15AM Nov 7th: He said he was sorry

10:16AM Nov 7th: I said ‘it’s okay’

10:16AM Nov 7th: we laid there together just bathing in our fears

10:17AM Nov 7th: I don’t know why. But I saw the human in him.

10:17AM Nov 7th: He was probably just as broken as me

10:18AM Nov 7th: He drove me to my park

10:18AM Nov 7th: I got on the swirly slide. I just laid there and cried

10:19AM Nov 7th: I finally walked home

10:19AM Nov 7th: My father opened the door

10:19AM Nov 7th: Asked me ‘how was it’

10:20AM Nov 7th: I said ‘i’ll never forget it…’

10:20AM Nov 7th: as he pressed for questions. I grew impatient

10:20AM Nov 7th: Said ‘dad in so tired can I just go to bed’

10:21AM Nov 7th: he dismissed me and I trudged up the stairs.

10:21AM Nov 7th: My legs hurt. And my heart was filled with despair

10:21AM Nov 7th: I went to the bathroom and locked the door

10:22AM Nov 7th: I took apart a razor I had just gotten from the store

10:22AM Nov 7th: I did what I had to do to forget.

10:23AM Nov 7th: It seems it’s been my only way since sixth grade

10:24AM Nov 7th: When the kids called me fat even though I was a double zero

10:24AM Nov 7th: And I began to watch my weight like it was a MTV show.

10:25AM Nov 7th: I cried as I remembered how I’d starve for days

10:25AM Nov 7th: And my parents never noticed

10:26AM Nov 7th: So I laid there and watched the blood gather on the floor

10:26AM Nov 7th: Then my weak hands reached for the door

10:27AM Nov 7th: I ran into my little sister she saw and shook her head.

10:27AM Nov 7th: Then she looked at me and said. ‘Just don’t let them see sissy.’

10:27AM Nov 7th: she kissed my head and walked away

10:28AM Nov 7th: I swear after that night I was never the same

10:28AM Nov 7th: My dad became to want ‘favors’ from me too

10:29AM Nov 7th: He would use it to bribe me if I wanted to hang out after school

10:30AM Nov 7th: I didn’t know that I should have told somebody what he was doing to me

10:30AM Nov 7th: Sex just became second nature to me

10:31AM Nov 7th: My father let me as long as he got details sometimes I’d even have to let him see

10:32AM Nov 7th: I was just a young girl. Who quickly became afraid of men.

10:32AM Nov 7th: Then years past and it never stopped.

10:32AM Nov 7th: Finally on day I began to pop

10:33AM Nov 7th: I sent a boy away

10:33AM Nov 7th: And told my father enough was enough

10:33AM Nov 7th: He cried and said ‘I’m just so weak’

10:34AM Nov 7th: I looked at him and saw the brokenness too

10:34AM Nov 7th: I took pity on him and became the fool

10:35AM Nov 7th: Things never changed they just got worse

10:35AM Nov 7th: Till one day I met a boy who in the end hurt my heart worst

10:36AM Nov 7th: We met in my typical situation

10:36AM Nov 7th: We were both undressed within a matter of seconds.

10:37AM Nov 7th: But I could tell he was different.

10:37AM Nov 7th: I pledged myself by not hooking up with complete strangers.

10:38AM Nov 7th: But for him I was eager

10:38AM Nov 7th: But there was something different about this guy

10:39AM Nov 7th: He returned the favor and actually said goodbye

10:40AM Nov 7th: On the bus ride home we sat next to each other. Talked for hours on end

10:40PM Nov 7th: We held each other’s hands and told each other our favorite bands

10:41PM Nov 7th: He looked me dead in the eyes and asked if I would please consider seeing him again

10:42PM Nov 7th: I went home filled with smiles and cheer

1:01PM Nov 7th: Annyways. The guy eventually asked me to be his girl

1:02PM Nov 7th: And things were great for a while

1:04PM Nov 7th: But my dad got in the way. And ruined everything. One day I just couldn’t do it. So I told my boyfriend my secret

1:06PM Nov 7th: What happened next was a blur. I told him not to tell. We tried to act normal. We had been dating for over a month when I took his virginity

1:07PM Nov 7th: I fell in love for the first time. But my secret was too much for him. He needed time to think. I thought I was going to lose him.

1:09PM Nov 7th: A lot happened. But all that matters is that my secret was about to become puplic. Him & my friends made me tell

1:10PM Nov 7th: All my efforts to keep a normal life were crumbling right before my eyes.

1:11PM Nov 7th: I remember telling my closest teacher and CPS and the police and dectectives. I remember having to tell them everything about my dad

1:35PM Nov 7th: It was my boyfriend who told my mom. And she came to get me.

1:37PM Nov 7th: Weeks passed then I got the call. They said. ‘Sorry but there isn’t enough evidence’ I hung up.

1:38PM Nov 7th: That’s when I changed. I didn’t care anymore. And the people I was meeting gave me no reason to.

1:39PM Nov 7th: The guys I’ve been with, ha none of them care. They just look at me like I’m just some other hoe.

1:40PM Nov 7th: To that I say. I guess I am. I don’t know how else to be. It’s not my fault. Somebody else chose that for me.

1:47PM Nov 7th: Well that’s. The story of how I came to be who I am. Well the condensed version. I’d love to hear what you have to say. But I won’t be around

2:08PM Nov 7th: Take two. Hope I get this right

 

Both Sides Now: Recovery and Absolute Thinking

 

Hello Recovery Writers! I hope you all are well. As most of you know, I have recently had some struggles with my past behaviors and gotten back into therapy. This has me thinking about all sorts of issues in recovery which, of course, I end up writing about. I hope my ramblings are helpful to some of you. Peace, Sarah

There is good and bad in everything. I don’t believe anything in life is completely bad or completely good; it’s all shades of gray. Unfortunately, as addicts and people with eating disorders, we tend to think in terms of extremes and absolutes. Black and white, good and bad, yes or no, all or nothing. And that kind of thinking is part of what keeps us sick and addicted.

In my recent struggle with the reemergence of my own eating disorder, I’ve been thinking more about this. In the past I’ve certainly realized that despite how much damage my eating disorder and various other behaviors did, and despite the fact that they nearly killed me, they also ironically saved my life. The eating disorder, the cutting, the pills; those things protected my sanity even as they were destroying my life and my body. So I honor that. I appreciate and respect what they did for me. And in that way, I cannot see my eating disorder or my cutting or my addiction as entirely bad things. Someone who’s not well-acquainted with a situation such as this might wonder, how can you say that? And I would say, there were good intentions at the heart of it. People who have been there know what I mean.

And just like I can’t say that my eating disorder and self-destructive behaviors were all bad, I can’t say that recovery is all raindrops and roses. As much as I enjoy the freedom and peace and new opportunities that come with recovery, a lot of new responsibilities show up as well. When you recover, you have to grow up. You have to function like a person, like an adult. You have to do the everyday mundane things that you got to neglect when you were sick: laundry, bills, dishes, cooking, shopping, cleaning, etc. When you were depressed or manic or caught up in your disease, you probably ignored most of these things; I certainly did. I became quite dependent on other people for help with managing the grown up stuff like rent and insurance because it all seemed too overwhelming for me to deal with. I never opened my mail because I couldn’t handle looking at bills that I didn’t know how to pay. However, when you get into recovery, this changes. You have to learn how to deal with these things, face your fears, become more independent. You eat your meals, take your pills, get to your appointments. And there is a sense of accomplishment and pride in those things that is really cool. But sometimes there’s also a kind of wish to go back to when it was easier, when you could just throw up your hands and say, I can’t! I’m sick! and people would take care of things for you. I would never advocate staying sick just to avoid responsibility. But I can’t say that it hasn’t crossed my mind before either. When you grow up in a way that’s really abnormal, destructive, or abusive, it’s not uncommon to get to adulthood without having learned basic life skills like how to balance a checkbook or cook for yourself. So a lot of the time it can be easier to fall back on addiction or other behaviors rather than try to learn those skills and be independent. And I don’t judge anyone who does that— it’s scary as shit to take on being responsible for yourself, and it’s taken me a hell of a long time to get even halfway there. We are creatures of habit who seek to avoid pain, avoid fear. And so often that’s what leads us back into illness.

Really I think that what it comes down to is how much benefit you will get out of which state. Will you get more benefit out of being sick at the moment? Or will you do better with being recovered? There are benefits to both. There are also drawbacks to both. In my opinion, the benefits of recovery far outweigh the benefits of staying sick. And the consequences of staying sick far outstrip the discomfort and anxiety that can come with recovery. However, at certain times, that perception can shift and it can seem like a better idea to go back to the familiar comfort of your illness. I get that. I just did that. And I think it was because I felt like I was so overwhelmed with all the grown-up stuff I was doing, I just needed to be in a safe and comfortable place of dependency on something I knew I could count on the be there for me. And what fit that description better than my eating disorder?

I hope that soon I can come out of that place, and can re-create a feeling of safety outside of my eating disorder. As I’ve said before, recovery is a process and it comes in shades of gray. It’s not perfect or shit, all or nothing, a slip and back to day one. It’s just life. You forgive the bumps in the road, move past them as best you can, and keep pushing forward. The more you are able to do that the easier it is to remain in recovery; the more compassion you have, the easier it is to strike a balance between the extremes.

© Sarah Ann Henderson 2011

Voices: “Better”

This is the final post from the series! Thank you for reading this past Mental Health Month. I’m honored to enter your lives through poetry and even more honored to hear your stories and comments in return.

This last poem is brand new, just written a few days ago. I wanted to write something looking back from the other side of mental illness; what it feels like to be better. “Better” means different things to different people, I think mostly because the course of each person’s life and illness is so different. For some people, it means 100% recovery. For others, it’s just managing symptoms. For some, just staying out of the hospital for extended periods is a really big accomplishment. Celebrate those successes in whatever form they come, and try not to berate yourself for the times you fall down. Never stop advocating for yourself, not just as a patient but as a person too; you are more than your symptoms. Choose the people in your life carefully and try to have a good support system. Mental illness is a part of our lives but it does not have to be our whole lives.

My hope is for everyone with mental illness to have access to the resources they need to get “better”- whatever that means to them.

5/24/11

Better

There is a place that’s in between

It’s hard to find and rarely seen

But if you work and search it’s there

You only find it through self-care

For some that includes therapy

For others it means meals times three

For some it means ten pills a day

We do self-care in many ways

I know it’s isn’t always fun

But it’s a task that must be done

To stay here and to really live

Remember the alternative

Remember self-destructive nights

Terror and internal fights

Dissolving into fits of panic

Acting out when things turned manic

Diving into dark depression

Binge and purge in quick succession

Starving to make up for it

Cut to make it all just quit

Round and round and round it went

Never pausing to relent

Revisit what this felt like so

You’ll have the good sense to let go

To keep on caring for yourself

To keep on trying and getting help

And knowing that there is always hope

And support out there to help you cope

© Sarah Henderson 2011

Voices: “Places to Hide”

So here we are at the end of our third week in our series. So far I’ve mostly discussed the experience of mental illness, particularly depression. I haven’t so much mentioned the often self-defeating, self-destructive ways that most of us cope with mental illness and the factors in our lives that have contributed to it.

The vast majority of mental illness stems from a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental triggers; most commonly addiction, abuse, and/or trauma. Those experiences along with unstable families don’t allow for the development of self-esteem or healthy coping mechanisms, so a lot of us turn to things like drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, and self-harm to deal with unmanageable feelings. This was certainly what I did. In order to cope with growing up in a violent household, years of sexual and physical trauma via my father, a stranger rape at 16, my undiagnosed bipolar, and posttraumatic stress disorder, I did all of the above. I nearly died of anorexia and bulimia several times during my 16-year ordeal with the disease; I have scars in every place imaginable from all the cutting; I broke my own bones at times because I beat myself so hard with a ceramic curling iron; I abused vicodin, valium, klonipin, ambien, and other pills. Through most of the years I was doing these things, I really believed I could never live without them.

Thank God I was wrong.

I had a therapist who used to tell me, before you can give these behaviors up, you have to honor what they’ve done for you. Don’t get me wrong, they’re killing your body. But these behaviors are protecting your mind. Respect that, and thank them for that. And then let them go.  

7/1/03

Places to Hide

 

Between the lines I carve in my skin

At the edge of a blade that gently glides in

Afloat on the streams of blood that will follow

Once filling me up, now leaving me hollow

I trace the path of my freshly split vein

Twining up to my heart, the center of pain

And just below there, my eternal friend

The stomach that’s empty, shriveled, sunken

The best place to rest and perhaps disappear

A place that I’ve turned to for so many years

One among many places I’ve found

To be safe on my constantly turbulent ground

And then there’s the throat, bloodied and bruised

From the battering in-and-out cycle of food

And my pill bottles carefully lined in a row

A disturbingly fun pharmaceutical show

So many places I created to hide

From a self that I simply cannot abide

© Sarah Henderson 2003

Inside My Mind: A Journal of Major Depression

This piece is not part of the poem series; I’m taking a little detour. This piece is actually a collection of journal entries from a summer eleven years ago when I was in one of the worst  depressions of my life. For three months- ironically, just after leaving eating disorder treatment- I sat on a couch in my room and wrote about how miserable I was. In between I was self-harming, using drugs, and getting very, very sick with my eating disorder. This piece will hopefully offer a glimpse into the world of someone who walked with the shadow of suicidality, lived every day hoping she would die, and yet somehow managed to recover. The journal entires end with me beginning my school semester and still being really sick. It would take another eight years before I was really in recovery. I just want to show people that you can live through depressive episodes like this; as long as you stay breathing, there will be an end to it. You will eventually find peace.

Summer of 2000: A Chronicle of Major Depression

 

June

~     As I begin to move yet again I am experiencing the most hopeless inertia. In some ways it is similar to a feeling of needing to start over completely, toss the canvas overboard because your painting was beyond repair and must be created again from a fresh viewpoint. However, in this case I have the urge to drown with it… only I can’t do it. My hopelessness and feeling of impotence are so complete that even the energy for desperate suicidality has been depleted. I am left on deck without my previous work, without the motivation to work again, a wish to drown, and the weight of immobility that keeps me breathing.

I need a better analogy.

 

~        The most amazing thought process happened to me this morning:

I woke up. Not for any particular reason, no alarm… my meds wore off. Why am I awake? Sunday. No appointments to go to, no shrinks to see, no reason to get dressed or leave my room. Any phone calls? No. And bad TV.

I have to kill myself.

There is clearly no purpose for my existence today. However, even suicide seems boring and useless after last night’s attempt. You moron. The futility! If slitting your wrists actually resulted in death you wouldn’t be here to complain about the eighteenth time that it didn’t.

Sleeping is a better option.

Unfortunately, my mother keeps all of my meds in the kitchen. For safety, she says. Poor deluded old woman. I stand up too fast and promptly fall back down because I never EVER seem to get it through my head that my body is fucked up. Walking to the kitchen, I become annoyed with the hallway, its cold, hard, clay tile, how it strikes my thinly padded heels, sending shivers of pain up the bones. In the kitchen I gather thirteen pills including three painkillers and a couple of extra tranquilizers for good measure. I swallow them with the rest of the now tepid coffee in the pot and immediately return to my room, pausing only to turn up the thermostat because I’m fucking freezing in the Texas afternoon. I turn on the TV while waiting for the drugs to kick in. As per usual there was nothing on. I abandon all of my attention to the monotony of the Preview Channel. ER reruns tonight and my last thought before passing out is that now I don’t have to kill myself. ER used to be my favorite show.

~        This is getting really bad.

My self, mind, body, and my hatred for them cannot go on living in a state of panic over the others’ existence. That persistent fear that lies between self and self-hatred has taken me beyond a certain breaking, or perhaps boiling, point in my depression.

The body: too heavy to move. Sluggish, painful, and clearly defective; bloated to the point of bursting, my pale skin barely managing to hold the massiveness in. It is intolerable burden, this leaden mass of flesh.

I can identify few feelings or emotions. Pain. Despair, really. Exhaustion. As sense of being completely hollow, even inside the massive body, so that each thought rattles and echoes to create an intolerable internal friction.

But my head is really the worst. It’s a neurochemical war zone, serotonin and noradrenaline battling each other in my brain, horrifying images flashing through, screams and whispers and insults and threats.

It sounds so complicated for something that can simply be called misery.

~         Several major flaws in my thinking:

1) I am not, apparently, considered by other people to be expendable.

2) Hating yourself and your life and the body you live it in sucks.

3) There is no actual pressure from anyone in my life to do or be anything great; I am my own source of scholastic and vocational expectancy.

4) There are no people in my head. No one I know or don’t know actually sees me when I think they do and my life is not monitored and judged twenty-four hours a day.

5) There is not a pill to take that can significantly improve any situation I am currently in.

Self-realization is a trip.

It should also be considered that I have never actually accepted myself as bulimic. Every half-hearted attempt I have made to stop puking was purely and excuse to starve. If I am to recover from both disorders then every therapeutic technique that has been applied to my anorexia must also be applied to the bulimia.

To me, bulimia = shame. Nothing, but nothing, can make me want to die more than binging and purging. It is the worst. Full stop. Run to the kitchen, try to be quiet, fail, stuff your fucking face, sneak back, over the toilet, hacking, gagging, the metallic tang of blood and acid. GOD the acid burns, teeth marks on your hand, room spinning. Then back to the kitchen. Uncontrollable cow. Greedy slut. Fat useless lardass weakling piece of shit.

~         Shrink appointment today. Remember ask Dr. Hageman if there’s an Rx for:

. 1) The FUCKING PEOPLE in my head. I am being inscrutably monitored by these assholes, day in and day out. I am NEVER ALONE. Absolutely everything I do is watched and judged, from reading a book to taking a piss to talking in therapy. It does not stop. It is relentless.

I want them gone.

2) Heavy, sluggish, dulled painful feeling all over. Total lack of initiative.

3) Suicide being listed as Solution #1 to all problems.

4) One day this week, Saturday Night Live reruns were my reason to live.

5) The absolute fundamental basis of my eating disorder is that my body has been way too big for way too long. I found a way to be contained and I can’t let that go. Ever.

~         Things that happened while Shannon was gone (otherwise I’ll forget them):

Thursday– Saw Hageman, adjusted meds. Gave me a detox plan for Klonopin; Dad sent Mom a plant for their 26^th anniversary. (The chicken-shit prick); Weight 81 lbs.; Surrendered bottle of Klonopin to Mom. Shit shit shit. At least I kept a little Valium and some codeine.

Friday– Mom tried to get me out of the house. We ended up having a big fight about my depression, treatment, etc. I said too much and she was extremely disturbed.

Saturday– Rented more movies. Drove by the new house. Fucking realtor touched my back and I felt creepy all night; I stayed up all night exercising– aerobics, crunches, ballet; a friend from Laureate called. She’s just as sick as I am. I skipped my meds.

Sunday– I slept from 9am to 1pm. Mom came in to tell me that I need to start cleaning and packing more. Uh-huh. So fine. I watched Boys Don’t Cry which was extremely disturbing. Read awhile and took a nap. Sigh. Then cleaning– laundry, dishes, kitchen, my bathroom… holy shit. At least all of that scrubbing and carrying and folding got my heart rate up so I was burning some calories. However, given my generally static state recently, is it a big fucking wonder that I’m too sore to move? The shock to the body of aerobics, insomnia, and major cleaning after virtual hibernation is drastic. Meanwhile, I’m trying to detox from Klonopin and practically drooling over my little bit of Valium. Being proactive is NOT what they say it is. I won’t get anywhere.

 

Frostbite does not hurt until it begins to thaw.

July

 

~         AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

I want to die but I CAN’T!

I CAN’T!!

I want it all to go away but it WON’T.

It’s exactly what Joni wrote in “Trouble Child”: You can’t live life and you can’t leave it.

~        Written after a trip to the ER where 3 liters of saline had been run in by IV in only 1½ hours. My kidneys could not handle it. The result was becoming Monstro the Whale for 48 hours.

 

I feel so swollen.

The image in my head is that of a toy, a plastic tube filled with gel and glitter, the kind that worms out of your grasp the second you pick it up. I held one in the mall once. When squeezed, the sparkly ooze would puff up, stretching its thin clear plastic skin to the absolute limit while everyone squealed at the thought of it bursting.

That’s what I feel like.

I can feel every little cell freshly fattened with saline and blood, buoyant as little beach balls, squishing up against each other under the weak confines of my body. I sit as if on a water bed and all movement is made through prematurely formed Jell-o. I’m water logged. And that is where the idiocy comes in: I know for a fact, an indisputable fact, that this puffiness is the result of the IV fluids given at the hospital. I understand that and even believe it a little.

SO WHY CAN’T I STOP FEELING LIKE A BIG, JIGGLING, BUBBLE OF BLUBBERY FAT ???

~        Today is the very sort of day when suicide turns into such a natural option for me. The simple action of swallowing pills and lying down seems to me to be as uneventful and prosaic as any other nap. I don’t know why I feel this way. Nothing particularly tragic has happened today. Or perhaps it’s that nothing even particularly different has happened today and that is the tragedy. I am spending my time merely waiting, death and the maiden, in a constant state of mutual antagonism.

For me, this is far worse than a time when my depression had those dramatic, desperate tragedies one expects. When my family was in denial– when my various chemical imbalances were as yet undiagnosed– when my life revolved around blood and bones and vomit and Valium and the problem was just that no one knew– that was a time that held more hope for me than right this moment. In that type of depression there is always a peak, a point where you just can’t take it anymore, when things are so awful and no one can see enough to help because you just can’t bring yourself to tell them, that you just have to die. In a peak like that you are pretty sure that you want help and it’s just that no one will give it to you. Killing yourself will be your calling card. A last fuck you to the world. You are not doing this because life it hopeless– perhaps the opposite. You are doing this because there is hope, damn it, and you know there’s hope, but everyone is so fucking thick that they can’t see your Pain! And your Agony! People can help but there is not engraved invitation with your name on it and you, lacking all initiative at this point, are pissed. You’ll show them how stupid they were and they will be sorry. The entire basis of a depression like that is anger.

~       I was thinking about the contradictions that are my truth right now. About the fact that deciding what to do with myself this evening ultimately determines my own worth at the same time. See, I really wanted to do was exercise– that was the favorable option. I wanted to get high, such as I get high. But my friend from Laureate and I swore off exercise together. So maybe I’d just lie down. No. I needed to be doing something. If I couldn’t exercise (be good) then I was going to binge and purge (be bad). I would force myself to eat until I just had to, had to throw up, so I could wallow in the blood, the knife-like pain in my stomach. Do I like myself today? Do I deserve to feel good? Do I like myself enough to make myself exercise so I can feel good? Or am I too worthless for that today? Today, I might just deserve to be tortured with my own weakness and failure. Should I be praised for my strength and rise above the flesh? Or should I be punished for my guilty existence?

~     I was able to see tonight, for just a moment in the dark, how thin I really am. The stark outline of my silhouette, the rarely seen dark in my eyes, pupils dilated under low light. I traced the borders of my body with my fingertips, traveling over the hills of my bones, the hollows of my flesh. I felt the arbor of veins wrapped around my limbs like vines, and what little muscle that’s left stretched tight. For a fraction of a second I thought, Wow– I finally did it.

But, I told myself, it can’t be. The numbers– the numbers don’t work. 79 lbs? How can I be thin when the scale says I’m not? No, I was wrong, I didn’t see clearly, it was only a shadow. Just a longing mirage.

I flipped on the light, and I watched my face suddenly widen in the brightness. The familiar sight of glaring flaws. My pupils shrink back into icy blue-gray, and my body is once again in excess.

And there was nothing to do but turn away.

~        My depression is so deep right now that it has become an actual physical pain. My limbs ache with the weight of despair. The inertia is set in to the point that movement causes stinging throughout my weak muscles. Even breathing is a struggle. Sometimes I let go, breath stops, and I just let my heart pound away at my sternum. It causes the cross around my neck to jump. Sometimes I just wish it would lie still.

There is no purpose for my existence. I just wish I were thinner. Maybe it’s appropriate to be out of the hospital right now. I’m not that sick. I weigh 81 lbs. I’ve got a good 15 lbs. to go before warranting treatment.

~        Emily staying here is just a nightmare. Mom told me that she said, “Tell Sarah I’m sorry I fucked up her life.” She thinks that I hate her. She holds herself responsible for my entire eating disorder/drug dependency/depression/suicidality/self-mutilation/situation. How’s that for a guilt trip?

I don’t want her blaming herself for all of my problems. Christ on toast. I mean, I’d love to blame someone for this, sure (wouldn’t we all) but she is not #1 on the list. For one thing, I’m the one who fucked up. For another thing, I deserve it. And while it is pretty clear how she might come to her conclusion, it isn’t so clear how long it could take to get rid of it. I just want her to forget about me. You know?

~       I was asked the other day why I starve myself; or rather, what I get out of it. I told you the answers that I knew from books. I did not tell you what I know from life. I did not tell you the truth.

I like to see the veins. I like I like to see the tendons and the muscles and the bones. I like to watch scars form on my skin and see my skin grow transparent. I love to see the blood pulsing under the veins. I need to see this. I need to see this to know that I’m alive, it tells me I’m alive. I need to know that I am here and that my blood runs through my veins as water through a stem. I need to see that I can be seen and felt and touched and held. I need to be held. I need to be held and rocked and petted and stroked and whispered to and sighed upon. I need to feel the comfort and protection of a mother’s loving arms. And I need to be able to feel this, within myself and in God, if I am ever to be truly free.

~       Last night my mother cleaned out and packed every drawer in the kitchen desk. I came in to make a cup of tea (China Green– it burns 40 calories a cup, so they say) so I was there when she stumbled across a shoe box full of pictures. Some of them were relatively recent– from the early 80s, Emily’s and my childhood. I really wasn’t interested except for a few pictures from the 30s and 40s– Mom’s family. There are no pictures of my father’s family. I’ve never met them (except for his monster parents), I don’t know their names, and what limited knowledge I have of them comes from nightmare narratives from Mom. Anyway, I kind of got caught up in her storytelling about her family’s pictures. Despite my tendency to desperately avoid any socialization (particularly with my mother), I stayed, sipped my tea, and laughed about old times with family and friends.

It was like a goddamned Hallmark ad.

And I seriously regretted it. I hate these photographs that portray a little girl pretending to be okay. I hate that they prove my existence then, in a time where I wished to God NOT to exist. Years I can’t remember for a reason. I don’t want to remember now, I can’t handle this. I want it to stop. I HATE THESE PICTURES! I HATE THEM!! They aren’t me, can’t be me, I wasn’t there, not dancing, not singing, not posing, not smiling. I don’t understand. I feel no connection to this girl in the pictures. It’s as if she’s one of those distant relatives that I’ve heard about but never met.

Like someone related to my father.

~        There’s something wrong with the self-hatred I’m feeling right now. The more I examine it, the more I realize that my hatred is for my situation– and myself in it. Looking back, at lot of my self-hatred started that way. How does that translate? The room is messy, feels chaotic; lazy bitch, get up and clean it. Mom is stressed from packing for the move; you should help more, selfish brat. The family’s in turmoil; it’s your fuck up, you weak little nuisance. I suppose you could take that and apply it to any situation. It’s always my fault. If something is wrong, I started it, kept it going, should keep my mouth shut, and fix it. Whining doesn’t accomplish anything.

Some little things I’ve noticed seem to be confirming the notion that I’m disappearing. I walk out under the porch light without triggering the motion detector. A nurse in the ER clips a pulse oxymeter on my finger but can’t get a reading. I try to adjust the desk chair but I don’t weigh enough to make it go down. It’s only little stuff but when you think the way I do, where everything is shot through the anorexia prism, you can build up a strong case.

August

 

~        I haven’t been making any sense in the last few days. Yesterday morning I broke down in tears and wailed for about 2 hours. I still don’t know why. I…. just… feel… shitty. My hands cannot stop shaking. My arms and legs feel clumsy. I am a conglomerate of bodily shame. That’s really the problem: I feel ugly. My God. Heinously, grossly, devastatingly ugly. Fat and fleshy and pale and short and something else– damaged, I suppose. Blemished and ruined. Exposed for the mess I truly am. It’s horrible.

There’s also this sense of being completely inept. As unsophisticated and lame as a two-year-old. I feel as if I will be laughed at and possibly scolded for all that I say and do. No, no! Stupid girl! Little shit! Leave me alone. Do it yourself, stop complaining, nothing’s wrong, do I have to spell this OUT for you?? Damn it, stop acting like a child. You’re being a brat, a wimp, a crybaby, a pain. You’re spoiled/needy/selfish/greedy/awkward/impossible/irritating…

Fuck. That is how I feel 24/7. How can anyone possibly get any work done (or even feel capable of working) with THAT in their head? Aren’t there PILLS for this? Aren’t I ON most of them? There is nothing in my life that I feel confident about, sure of, proud of. There’s nothing that I work towards. There is no purpose for me.

~        Therapy is extremely tiresome. It’s as if I have to narrate my life. Narrate it; like the fucking Greek tragedy it is, right? Every little thought and action falls into one of two categories: Worth (Therapy) Time or Not Worth Time. Most things actually fall into the first category but I don’t actually bring them up because I get tired of hearing myself complain.

Now, honestly, I realize that I’m never going to do any better for a therapist than Shannon. If anyone can possibly help me, it is she. I was incredibly fortunate that she fell on my path and I think the world of her. However, that does not inhibit my frequent inclination to want to rip her fucking head off. I become completely irrational and a big baby and think: all she does is TALK. Why doesn’t she just FIX IT? Hello?? I just want to scream at her to DO SOMETHING instead of just TALKING! It’s like that line in As Good As It Gets: “I’m drowning here! And you’re describing the water!”

~        I registered for school today. It made me want to cry. Actually, I did cry. The entire concept of participating in life is so painful. The idea of getting back to an actual schedule and some version of normalcy reminds me a lot of physical therapy. It’s like I’ve had two huge plaster casts on my legs for a year and a half, but even now that the casts have been removed I am still lame. The fractures may be mended and the bones stable, but the muscles and tissues are completely atrophied. It’s going to hurt and be tedious to build myself up again… three days a week I’ll be interacting with people all day. There will be responsibilities outside of taking my meds and (supposedly) keeping my weight up. Imagine! The brain can be used for more than calculating calories and trying to combat suicidal ideation. I’m taking piano for my elective and there’s ballet– my friends (what’s left of them) will probably start their movie group again– I’ll have homework– God. The whole thing is thisclose to normal. The abnormal part is that I won’t be eating during it all. Forget it. No way can I handle both.

~       I haven’t been turning to God in these last months. Actually, I haven’t been turning to anyone. This makes me want to cry somehow, like the baby girl grasping at her father’s legs, which are walking away from her– no! Don’t leave me! But I am so afraid that her tiny fists are beginning to lose their grip.

All these fucking thoughts! I don’t need it! Everybody just SHUT UP for one FUCKING second!! You all jabber at me at once it’s just obnoxious!

How is it possible for someone to so deeply despise herself? Where did she get the ability to hear this tireless criticism? Why does she feel so compelled to agree?

Is it selfish to do what I’m doing? Do I really need to spend all this time speculating about myself? (As if you’re important.)  Is it selfish when someone else writes down their thoughts? (No, that’s called journaling, and it’s fine for people who have something interesting to say.) What if these notebooks were to be read by someone else? (You’re fucking pathetic. You’re in denial. Not one will ever care about your little self-important-badly-written-psycho-bullshit-thoughts.) Then why do I write and go to therapy? (Because you’re self-indulgent, crazy, and you have nothing better to do.) Lame-ass.

~       Having my wisdom teeth out on Thursday was quite and experience– It forced me to go almost four whole days without purging. FOUR DAYS. That may not sound like much but if you put into consideration the fact that I’ve been throwing up almost daily (minus hospital time) for a year and a half, this is major. Well, it was major. I broke down today and threw up. I couldn’t take it anymore. I just feel so disgusting when I don’t. Completely powerless– chaotic, weak, scared, out-of-control, you name it. Vulnerable… like every shield I have is down and anyone can get to me. If I’m not purging and/or restricting, who’s to say WHAT goes in and out of my body? There has to be SOME type of protection against intrusion or else everything that went into my body would have to STAY no matter how awful it felt. And over the last four days, everything has felt awful. There is this constant physical sensation of–God, there’s just no way to put this delicately– fingers. Being molested. It is disgusting. I want to kill myself. I pray for it to go away but I still feel it. I want to call Shannon, but what can she do? Just keep breathing, Sarah, stay right here, it’s you are safe at this moment, keep breathing, my dear. Helpful, maybe, while I’m on the phone but useless as soon as I hang up. I just want someone to tell me that this is not my doing, it is not unusual, and I am not completely perverted for fixating on it.

~        What is the matter with me? I’ve become a raging bitch. Yesterday my uncle, for whom I have great respect, started to make a sincerely concerned comment regarding my lack of appetite (for the third time) and I actually interrupted him with this: “Hold on. Before you say another word, let me remind you that you are speaking to someone who believes that the use of full-fat salad dressing epitomizes insanity.”

Cringe.

~        I have been pretty depressed lately. And angry– frustrated, I suppose. My eating disorder is a mess, so clearly the rest of my life is in chaos. I mean, my eating disorder is the central force of my life. If it goes downhill, then everything else goes with it. Because I still have about 98% of my self-worth wrapped up in my ability to starve and/or puke– that means that if I’m having trouble with it I automatically become incapable of anything else.

So anyway, in the past week and a half bulimia has been out of control. Maybe it’s because it was the week before my period; maybe it’s because my therapist is out of town; whatever. All I know is, I have been filled with anger and shame about my obsession with food and/or the lack of it. I am so depressed that because I can’t seem to get off my lazy ass and exercise. I’m eating more and more normally everyday. I’ve been at the SAME FUCKING NINETY POUNDS for weeks and I HATE IT!! All I want is to be seriously anorexic again. I want to be that small, gray, spindly, ghost of a girl that I was not too long ago. I want the sunken eyes, the drawn face, translucent skin, concave chest, layer of fur, bony joints, and jutting hips riddled with bruises. I want these breasts and thighs and this fat stomach gone. I want the whispers and worries and gasps and stares. I want to show everyone how strong I am, how powerful. I want to feel that alive again. Isn’t that ironic? That the times that I feel most alive are when I’m half-dead? That the only time I am not afraid of myself is when I believe I have achieved control through starvation?

I’m really sick.

© Sarah Ann Henderson 2000

Voices: “Maintenance”

Welcome to the second week of Mental Health Month! The third poem in our series describes a situation that will probably sound very familiar to those who have suffered with chronic mental illness. During treatment, at some point you reach a stage in which you feel like you’re just treading water. Therapy and meds are just effective enough to keep you out of the hospital, but are not effective enough to allow you to live a real live and feel like a person. You may not like the doctors you’re working with or you haven’t quite found the magic cocktail of medications yet;whatever the case, you are miserable. People see you and praise you for doing better- at least you’re not slitting your wrists- but you want to laugh in their faces and say are you kidding me? This is not a life!

But time marches on. And if you are fortunate, as I have been, you will eventually find the right meds, the right doctors, the right circumstances in which to begin a real life again. You will feel human, and describe yourself as more than a cluster of symptoms. You’ll recover.

6/10/04

Maintenance

I hear people say, “You’re doing so well”

But this happens to be my personal hell

So lonely and meager, this tedious rut

And each door I turn to promptly slams shut

No school to attend, no papers to write

Life’s at a standstill, nothing is right

A job that I hate, that doesn’t pay shit

But somehow I don’t have the guts to just quit

At my mother’s apartment, no space of my own

I come back to this place that I can’t quite call home

There’s only this canvas on which I paint words

Though even this seems to be slightly absurd

Twenty-two pills day, just to stay sane

To keep me from drowning in anguish again

To stave off the thoughts of ending my life

To keep me away from razors and knives

I torture myself in pursuit of my past

Hoping that somehow I can outlast

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll come to a place

Where I can close my eyes without seeing his face

© Sarah Henderson 2004

“There’s No Stigma”: A Response

Sorry. Stigma is alive.

DJ Jaffe, founder of the Mental Illness Policy Organization, wrote an article in the Huffington Post last week declaring that “there is no stigma to having a mental illness.” I am not in agreement with Jaffe’s statement that “stigma is dead,” and- even better- that “eliminating [it] was relatively easy.” When I did a little research on Mr. Jaffe, I found no evidence that he has ever had the pleasure of having a psychiatric illness and encountering stigma himself. So where exactly does he get the right to say that stigma is gone? Because unfortunately, a lot of us who actually live with mental illness still find stigma in places that we really need support: our jobs, our friends, even our families. I don’t believe that abolishing stigma is as easy as changing our thinking. Perhaps for the individual, that is a good process to go through and understand that he or she is not a leper for having a mental illness, and that they deserve as much love and support as someone going through cancer or any other disease. But I don’t know how well that works on a large scale. Jaffe also claims that awareness campaigns are “not only ineffective, but harmful.” He thinks we should stop focusing on awareness about a “non-existent stigma” and instead turn our efforts to changing policy. While I agree that some awareness campaigns are not doing the cause any favor with their wording, I think it’s a little drastic to stop raising awareness altogether. There are still many people who don’t have any or have very limited knowledge of mental illness- including medical personnel- and that needs to be addressed. I do agree that we need to refocus the awareness campaigns on what actually goes on with psychiatric patients instead of trying to make mental illness appear to be the cake walk it most certainly is not. Perhaps focusing more on making the public aware of signs and symptoms and how to access treatment would be more beneficial than trying to gloss it over and make mental illness appear friendly, the way some campaigns currently are. One campaign, called No Kidding, Me Too! (nkm2.org) goes so far as saying it wants to make having mental illness “cool and sexy.” Cool and sexy?? Get serious.

Jaffe claims that stigma is gone, and that all we are facing now is prejudice and discrimination. That we should be focusing on gaining more rights for people with mental illness. Of course, we should never stop fighting for our rights. But I think he’s got it a little backwards. Isn’t discrimination simply the way stigma manifests in society? Stigma isn’t just a way of thinking, it’s a way of behaving, a way of treating people as if they’re different. Being stigmatized is to be outcast, branded a pariah. To be stigmatized is to be looked at as something less than you are, something outside of who you are- to not be seen for who you are at all. It is a form of prejudice, where you are labeled and categorized before being known, without having the chance to be known. Once someone has placed a stigma on you, it is extraordinarily difficult to reverse their thinking or their view of you. Most of the time, it’s easier to walk away than to waste time trying to change their minds. I have lost jobs and opportunities because of my history of mental illness. I was once interviewing for a position as a nanny and even though I had not engaged in self-harm for over three years (and I am an excellent caregiver), once the mother asked about the scars on my arms that was the last I heard of her. I can understand that, but I can also be angry about it, because that was not the only time it happened. I know many other people with very similar stories who have lost jobs and relationships over their issues with mental illness.

That, to me, is the definition of stigma.

Sometimes it does boggle my mind that with all of the education and publicity about mental illness and with celebrities coming forth to say they suffer from these diseases, the general public is not more understanding. But as I wrote in one of  my former articles, there is something about a mental illness that disturbs people in a way that physical illness does not. The brain, the mind, is the seat of the soul. When something breaches that, it can be extremely unsettling to watch. You see that the self you once thought inviolable is not necessarily so. I get why that would freak people out in a way that something like pneumonia wouldn’t. However, that does not give anyone the right to treat a person with a psychiatric illness as if they are ignoble. The majority of people with mental illness, when treated properly, are extremely high functioning. You would not know that I have bipolar unless I told you. You would not know that I nearly died from anorexia and bulimia, that I was once crippled by posttraumatic stress disorder. Unless you look closely you don’t really see the faded scars on my arms from years of self-inflicted wounds. I take my medication as prescribed, I see my therapist when needed, and I eat like a normal person. I go to school and I work and I write and I live. This is how it is for many people with mental illness. We take our meds and see our shrinks and go about our days, and we are perfectly capable of anything that someone without mental illness is capable of.

Obviously, it is not this way for everyone. There are many others who suffer greatly every day, who struggle because they cannot afford treatment or because treatment is ineffective. There are people who need intensive care for most of their lives due to the severity of their disease. And there are, sadly, people who die from mental illness. As Jaffe said, on one of the few points I agree with, we should put our efforts into changing public policies that further victimize and discriminate against people who are already suffering through mental illness, especially those policies that force patients to become suicidal or dangerous before qualifying for treatment. But saying that stigma is nonexistent does not serve anyone. It is simply ignoring the reality that those with mental illness encounter every day. And haven’t we done that enough?

© Sarah Henderson 2011

Here in the Mirror: Finding Beauty Beyond Body Image

So, unexpectedly tonight I had an article pour out of me. You never know when the muse is going to show up, so I tend to go with it! I hope you enjoy it.

Here in the Mirror: Finding Beauty Beyond Body Image

Tonight, I looked at my body. I have not done this in a long time, not intently anyway. As I was undressing to shower, I caught my reflection in in the bathroom mirror and for some reason it stopped me. For some reason, I felt there was something I needed to see.

As I stood there staring at my naked reflection it occurred to me that I did not have the instinct to turn away in fear, as I had for many years. I was able to look solemnly and appreciate this image, this form that encompassed my physical being.

This is what I saw.

At first, I had old memories appear. I could see every place that I was ever touched in cruelty, every place on my body that I was violated by someone I should have been able to trust. I used to feel those touches repeat themselves over and over in my body, like a record endlessly skipping.

Then I saw the way I coped with this. I blamed my body for accepting those violations without putting up more of a fight. I blamed those places for attracting the violations, as if I had a choice, as if it was really my fault. So I punished my flesh. I split my skin open with razor blades and knives and scissors countless times- arms, legs, breasts, stomach- I cut everywhere I could. I saw the scars all over my body from those punishments and did not feel shame, only compassion. I remembered flashes of other mirrors, other bodily inspections, only then I was counting my bones. I punished by flesh was by trying to get rid of it altogether. I starved and puked and ran until I weighed practically nothing and was nearly dead; and yet I was proud. I felt safe in that body- excuse me, that skeleton. I felt strong and invincible which was ironic because I could hardly walk. I see now a body so far from that time. Healthy, capable, brave in its softness. I accept the shape that I am because it means that I am no longer in danger of dying. I accept it because I have enough respect for myself to not care what other people think, and to put what is best for my health and recovery before anything else.

When I turned I saw the eleven inch scar that curves down my back from my left shoulder blade to beneath my arm. I see four oval shaped scars each the size of a nickel; two beneath my left arm and two lower down on my side. These scars remind me how resilient the body is. After all, at twenty-three years old I had my chest cracked open and part of my lung removed; my heart stopped in surgery, I was in a coma for two days, I had four huge tubes coming out of my chest, an unidentified raging infection, and I still managed to fully recover. I am proud of these scars, because they make me remember how strong I really am, to have been able to survive that.

When I turned back around, I took one last look and realized that all of those things my body held were like a little history of my life. My body was a tablet that my story had been written on; each mark and scar and tattoo has a story, and those stories make up my life so far. And what I see in that, finally, is beauty. My body is beautiful. Mostly, because I am beautiful, and because I have survived and recovered and accepted and developed compassion for my experiences. This is the way I believe we can find beauty in ourselves: by removing the blame and fear and guilt and shame and rage that has been wrongly pinned on the body, and finding compassion for exactly where we are.

© Sarah Ann Henderson 2011

Surviving Suicide: The First Day of the Rest of My Life

March 25^th is a significant day in my life– in my life and in the lives of the people I love, the people who love me. Twelve years ago when I was fifteen years old could have been the anniversary of my death. Instead, I celebrate it as the day that my life changed forever, the day I got a second chance, the day that hope became an option.

March 25^th, 1999 was the day I had decided to commit suicide. I had been planning it for weeks. I had written goodbye letters to my friends, handwritten a crude teenager’s will, allotting my few treasured possessions to the people I loved. I was going to overdose on Valium; I figured that would be the most painless for everyone. I had thought about slitting my wrists—I wasn’t afraid of pain myself—but I didn’t want to traumatize whoever found me. I remember that day in great detail. I had been in a terrible state for months and months, struggling with cutting, Valium addiction, a raging eating disorder, undiagnosed bipolar, and posttraumatic stress disorder. No one really knew the extent to which I was suffering, though my family had their suspicions. My mom was aware that something was seriously wrong but couldn’t reach me through my rage and despair. I was intensely isolative, holing up in my room in the dark and not coming out for days on end. Suicide was constantly on my mind. At that time, I truly did not care whether I lived or died. In many ways, I would have preferred death. I was in so much pain, so full of rage, so exhausted from years of living in a state of semi-panic, just trying to survive. I had been a virtual adult in so many ways. Intellectually, through my over-achieving perfectionism in every school-related and extra-curricular activity. Emotionally, in being my mother’s confidante and inappropriately having to be responsible for her feelings. Practically, in being responsible for my sister’s unstable psychological state and keeping her from going off the deep end. Even sexually, from the age of three, thanks to my pedophile father. I did not feel fifteen. I felt fifty. And while on the one hand I was very secretive about what I was doing, on the other hand, I was aware that this behavior was at some level a cry for help. Ironically, it was that suicidality that kept me alive. Just knowing that I had an escape hatch, a plan, a way out if I wanted to take it, gave me a backwards kind of hope. It allowed me to be curious, just curious enough, about what might happen if I told someone about the state I was in. Because even once I did, on the chance that something went wrong I could still check out if I needed to. I had it all figured out. I was going to commit suicide. But before I did, I would tell someone. Just to see what would happen.  At the very least, they wouldn’t be able to say that I didn’t warn them.

This is the story of that day.

That day I crawled out of the dark cocoon of my bedroom and went to school for the first time in weeks, because I needed to say goodbye to my friends. This was going to be particularly painful, because I didn’t go to a regular school where it was just me and them. I went to a tiny alternative school where at least one parent came with the kids so they could act as the teachers. Which meant that I had to ride in a car and spend the day with my mom and sister if I wanted to see everyone else. I felt I owed my friends at least a goodbye, however, so I forced myself to make that sacrifice. I hated being around my mom at that time. She was so concerned, hovering, and all it did was piss me off. So once we got to school I did my best to ditch her. I found my best friend Camilla and we started chatting, as if everything were normal. I had no idea how to tell her what was going to happen. So instead, at some point during our conversation I pulled my sleeves up to reveal my arms: pale, thin, and beset with rows of small, carefully carved incisions, bright red in stark contrast to my ashen skin. I don’t know if I said anything to prepare her but if I did it was useless. The expression on her face at this display was one of shock, panic, and horror. She looked pained, as if my injuries had just injured her. I can’t remember what she said, if anything. I wouldn’t have known how to reply anyway.

I repeated this little show periodically throughout the day, presenting my arms to a few people, basically just to see how they would react. I was daring someone to care. Giving them one last chance to see what was happening and pull me from the fire. Not surprisingly, most people reacted the way Camilla did: visibly disturbed, immobilized with confusion, clueless as to how they should respond.

It was nearing the end of the school day and no one had really done anything, so I figured by that point that no one would. I went on to math tutoring with a woman named Jill, whom I looked up to and adored. She was one of many surrogate mothers that I had adopted at school, very kind and somehow unendingly patient with me, even through my alarming deficiency in algebra. Months later, she would tell me that she always had a sense that something was not right, and that she tried her best to make a connection with me, hoping that she could help me to not feel so alone. That afternoon in the classroom, we had not yet begun working when Jill was called out of the room for something. When she returned, my sleeves were rolled up, my arms were on the desk, and I tried to act nonchalant as she glanced down at them. To her credit, she did not fall apart in front of me. In fact, she managed not to appear even slightly fazed as she resumed our conversation. That only lasted for a minute or two, however, before her eyes welled up with tears and, shakily, she excused herself and walked out. I knew at that moment that she was leaving to find my mother.

As I sat there waiting for the shit to come down, two or three people came by and looked in on me. First up was Marty; a hyper, chirpy, round little woman who drove a Volkswagen bug and believed that, deep down, we are all beautiful people. She was my home room teacher and apparently the first person Jill went to, which was not the wisest idea considering her sun-shiny innocence about life in general. The second she walked in and looked at the sizeable collection of self-inflicted cuts along my arms, she went white. I thought about the possibility that she might faint and how very little I cared. In fact, the thought of her roly-poly little body hitting the floor and bouncing about like a rubber ball was rather amusing. She left open-mouthed, without saying a word. The next person to walk in was a man named Reggie. He was my friend Robbin’s father, a master in martial arts who was one of the most passive, gentle human beings I’d ever met. He stood in the doorway with the saddest smile, one that would have broken my heart had I not been so detached from it. He tried softly to kid me, asking if perhaps I had incurred my injuries during a struggle with a rake. I don’t remember how or if I replied.

Before I knew it, I was in a little back room of the school with my mother. She was demanding that I show her my arms. I glared at her, hovering somewhere between rage, relief, and total indifference. I very coolly told her to fuck off. She took me by the wrist, pushed up my sleeve, and surveyed my wounds. I expected her to decompensate, scream, sob. Oddly enough, she just stood there for a second, then heaved a great sigh. That kind of threw me. She said something about how she wasn’t all that surprised. She had known for a while that I wasn’t okay. She could see how detached I was, how dead my eyes were. She said that she was almost relieved to see this visible sign of my pain, something tangible to point to, an inarguable reason to get me some help. I ripped my arm from her grasp, told her that she was full of shit, that I didn’t need any of her fucking help, thank you, and that all I really wanted was to be left alone.

Now, in truth, I was a bit ambivalent about that last statement. Mom was calling my cuts a cry for help and in a way she was right. However, there was no way I would have admitted that to anyone then.   ,

We came out of the little back area and stood around our table in home room. It was the end of the school day, people were milling about and gathering their things, and I was facing off with my mother, arguing a little too loudly about what was going to happen next. She insisted on taking me directly to my sister’s psychiatrist. I said that there was no fucking way I was going to any shrink and I didn’t want to go home with her either.

“Well, you’re sure as hell not going anywhere alone while you’re a danger to yourself,” she snapped.

I glared.

“She can come ‘round to my house and sleep over,” Camilla offered, in her soft British accent.

I immediately pounced on the idea, insisting that it was the best thing for that night. But Mom put her foot down. She grabbed me by the arm, pulled me aside, and hissed that there was no way she would put that kind of responsibility on Camilla’s family. What if something happened to me while I was there? They would never forgive themselves. No, that was not an option.

At some point I must have gotten into the car and gone home with her because all of a sudden I was sitting on my bed in my room, the lights off, the last of the afternoon sun casting shadows through the half open blinds. I was just sitting. Contemplating. Trying to reconcile with this undeniable presage I felt deep in my bones: that something in my family’s world had shifted, and nothing would ever be the same after this moment. Just then my mother walked in to tell me that we had an appointment with the doctor, and we had to leave.

Once in the waiting room at Dr. Adair’s office, the tension heightened to an almost intolerable level. No one had a fucking clue how to speak or how to behave. Everyone was trying not to look at me, speaking softly, no sudden moves, handling me as if I were a ticking time bomb. Emily and I sat in chairs clear across the room from each other while my mother sat by the courtesy phone and tried to get a hold of my father. It took her paging him four times before he finally called back. Emily and I listened to Mom’s side of the conversation as they fought:

“Tom? What the hell took you so long, I’ve been paging you for a half hour… I had to bring Sarah to Dr. Adair’s office. She’s sick, she’s cut her arms. It’s important that you be here, we should present a united front… What do you mean, you have surgery?!… Uh-huh. Well it had better be critical, and I mean somebody’s eyeball better be hanging out of their head because if this is some elective procedure that can be rescheduled I am going to be so pissed…For Christ’s sake, Thomas, this is your CHILD, call your goddamn patient and tell them that she’s sick, they’ll understand…I swear to God, you either show up with in the next hour or don’t bother to EVER show up again.” Thwack! She slammed the phone down so hard that Emily and I both jumped.

“Unbelievable,” she muttered, shaking her head slightly, her eyes wide with incredulity. This struck me as odd. She actually seemed somewhat surprised at his lack of concern. As if, despite historical evidence, part of her had truly expected him to rise to the occasion and support her through a family crisis.

Some kinds of hope are relentless.

Forty minutes later, we were still sitting in the waiting room. Apparently we had arrived at the beginning of Dr. Adair’s last session. My father showed up just as that patient was leaving.

“Nice of you to make an appearance,” Mom spat at him. He ignored her.

“Hey Slim,” he said to me casually, using one of the generic nicknames that applied to all three of us. “What’s happening?”

I snorted lightly and turned away. Nothing, I thought. I’m only dying.

Just then Dr. Adair walked out. The way she looked always made me a bit uncomfortable. She was a large woman, what my grandfather would’ve called a “stud of a broad.” Her clothes were always a little too tight, her hair always slightly unkempt, and it irritated me. She greeted us solemnly and invited me back to her office. Reflexively, Mom got up to follow.

“Actually Dee,” said Dr. Adair “why don’t you stay out here with Emily; I think Tom ought to come back with us this time.”

All four of us froze, stunned. This came completely out of left field. Looking back, I can see her rationale: Mom and daughter are fused, daughter protects mom by not admitting any feelings, daughter is more likely to talk in front of father. That would make a certain amount of sense under normal circumstances. However. Add in the incest factor (which, to be fair, she did not know about) and it was actually the stupidest move possible. I think, though, that we were all to shocked to argue.

As predicted, the next forty minutes were a nightmare. I sat there on the worn leather couch, forced to watch my father feign concern, listening to Dr. Adair make asinine analyzations (which she clearly thought were brilliant) such as, “You know, Tom, I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that you are a surgeon and Sarah has cut her arms.” I glared at her wearily as she presented me with my options: Either go home with my parents, let them monitor me until tomorrow, or go to the hospital. In another move that was rather senseless, she warned me that choosing the hospital had the potential to ruin the rest of my life; every time I applied to a school or a job it could be found out that I spent time in a mental hospital. First of all, that’s blatantly untrue, since medical records are confidential. And secondly, thanks, lady, for threatening me with some future stigma when being admitted to that mental hospital might be the only thing that would save my life. Brilliant.

Fortunately, I did not care. I was absolutely, positively, NOT going home with my parents, and I told her so.

“Well,” Dr. Adair said ominously. “The psych ward it is, then.”

I walked in to the third floor of the Pavilion in St. David’s hospital, my entire family in tow, and looked around suspiciously. I’m not sure what I expected to see; padded walls, maybe? Bars on the windows? Instead, all I saw was an ordinary waiting area: uncomfortable chairs with rough, badly patterned fabric, low wooden tables with a few ancient magazines tossed about on top, heavy on the teal. There was your typical reception desk with the little sliding window, a tired looking woman with a wall of files behind her handing forms to my puffy-eyed mother. Off to the side I noticed two little rooms labeled Intake 1 and Intake 2. Next to that there was a set of substantial-looking double doors, ones that could only be opened with a computer keycard– I recognized those from around the ERs I’d been in over the years. Beyond those there was an open area with another, larger desk and directly across from that was another set of locked double doors. I figured that must be the entrance to the actual unit. Someone interrupted my surveying of the space by handing me a clipboard and pen– apparently, I was supposed to provide information to them about something. I couldn’t think. Everything seemed a tad surreal, depersonalized, as if I were watching it all happen on a screen in front of me instead of literally being there. I gathered enough attention to fill out the forms: Name, Age, Medical History, Psychiatric History, Primary Complaint? I was given a stapled stack of papers informing me of my Rights as a Patient.

Huh. I have rights? First time for everything.

We sat there waiting for what seemed to be an eternity. As the four of us alternated between stunned silence and terse bickering, I kept looking around, searching for something, anything to reassure me, trying to get a grip on what was happening. At one point, I saw a girl on the other side of the double doors. She was trailing behind a nurse, carrying a pillow in one arm and a blanket in another, looking as miserable as I felt. She stared straight at me with deep brown eyes, ringed with dark circles and disturbing in their emptiness. I remember thinking that she looked like a ghost. I wondered if I looked like that too.

Eventually, some woman showed up to take the clipboard from my hand, and she led me into the room labeled Intake 1. It was a tiny room, with only enough space for three chairs and a small table. She gestured for me to sit. I stepped cautiously past her, sat in a corner chair, and drew my knees tightly to my chest. She asked me a barrage of questions; about my family, my history, my feelings. She asked me to show her my arms. I obliged.

“What are you feeling right now?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Do you feel like you might harm yourself further?”

I shrugged again. “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.”

“It says here that you were planning to commit suicide. Is that accurate?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So, do you still feel like you want to kill yourself?”

I snorted. “Have you met my family?”

She did not seem amused. “Well. Do you think you need to be in the hospital?”

“I think that if it’s a choice between being in the fucking loony bin or going home with them, I’m going with the loony bin. Not like there’s much difference.”

Over in Intake 2, unbeknownst to me, my parents and sister were speaking with another counselor. Pretty soon we were all in one cramped little space, and the decision had finally been reached that I should be admitted.

Well. Color me shocked.

Okay. To tell you the truth— and again, I never would’ve admitted this at the time— as glib as I was acting, it was a shock. I was fifteen. I wasn’t some juvenile delinquent, I didn’t deal drugs or sleep around or belong to a gang. I was a “good” kid. How in the hell had I ended up here?

Clearly, I was in a good deal of denial about the things that I was doing. I didn’t really qualify any of my behavior as “disordered” quite yet. I had lived with my eating disorder for so long that it was normal to me. Same with the depression, the mania, the anxiety. I had never experienced anything else. I had been doing drugs for a good long time by then so that didn’t seem odd either; besides, it’s not like I bought them on a street corner or anything. They were just there, in the house, waiting to be taken. Samples of drugs that my father brought home, self-prescribed meds, bottles and boxes and packets, oh my. Valium was never in short supply. I could even procure my very own prescription if I felt like it. All I had to do was wait until my father was busy with something, then loudly interrupt him with a complaint of sore dancer’s muscles or menstrual cramps, do my best to annoy him, and he’d write the scrip just to get rid of me. Not a problem. The cutting was a little harder to justify, but it still made since to me. It was necessary. It had a purpose.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting on a table in a small room designated for the medical exams that are mandatory upon admission. Though the doctor received that same snotty, fuck you treatment from me that everyone else had that day, he registered none of it in his face. My feeling was that he was probably a veteran at this, beyond any ability to be shocked, and I was therefore nothing special. Next stop was the unit itself.

The first nurse I encountered was, to my surprise, reassuring. While she obviously was not going to be taking any shit off of me, she had kind eyes and a nice smile. Her name was Kasia. Over the next couple of months, I would get to know her and all the other staff on the unit very well. For the time being however, she was just sitting there with my family, taking notes on another of what seemed to be an endless series of clipboards and forms. She asked my parents if I was on any medications. My father started rattling off the names of different drugs and doses while my mother sat there and stared in disbelief. He was making this up. He didn’t have a fucking clue what, if any medications I was on. And yet there he was, playing doctor, playing father, lying outright to make it seem as if he cared, as if he was involved in my life enough to know. Never mind that I could get hurt if they thought I was on meds that I wasn’t; never mind that it could affect my treatment. If he didn’t seem involved it would affect his image, and he was willing to risk his child harm to keep that from happening. Fortunately, Mom cut him off halfway through this pretend list with an appalled, “TOM.”

He looked at her. “What?”

She laughed slightly, incredulous. “You cannot make this up.”

“What do you mean?” Coolly. She’s the crazy one.

“Tom, this is her medical history, you cannot bullshit this. You don’t have a goddamn clue what you’re talking about because you are never there!” She was beyond crying at that point. Her nostrils were flaring, her head slightly vibrating the way it did when she was truly enraged about something. My father glanced at her with feigned pity, condescending. As if to say, you’re just being dramatic. You’re just trying to make me look bad.

Kasia looked at them, sizing them up. Reading the situation probably as clearly as anyone ever had.

She believed my mother.

“Why don’t you write out her meds for me, Mrs. Henderson. Here,” she said, handing the forms to Mom. Mom stared at her, grateful, disbelieving. Thank God. She can see through him. I was pretty impressed. She asked me to draw where I had cut myself, on a little diagram of body parts, and I did this, almost proudly. These were my battle scars. Collateral damage. I almost wanted to brag about them. You end up doing that on psychiatric units, trying to one up each other on what you’d survived, how much pain you could stand. You show each other your wounds and compare tragic childhoods, as if there is some reward for the worst story. As if you are not all still children.

You get used to opening up to strangers quickly. On short-term units like the one I was on you may only know each other for a few days, but it will feel as if you’ve known each other forever. You’ve probably told these people things that you’ve never shared with anyone before, exposed wounds that you’d convinced yourself were long scarred over but were in truth still raw, and that sharing will inevitably establish a bond between you. Most of you were never really allowed to be children and try as you might to resist, whether you like it or not, you will become fiercely attached to the staff for they are most likely the first adults who have ever made you feel cared for and safe.

This was certainly my experience. However, that feeling did not take hold immediately. It didn’t have a chance. In the last twelve hours, my entire world had been turned upside down. When I woke up that morning my plan for the day was this: go to school, say good-bye to my friends, come home, swallow a handful of Valium, and die. How was it then, that I was standing in a hospital, my shoelaces having been confiscated, pleading with some nurse to let me keep my necklace (”Please, it’s my cross, I never take it off”) when I was supposed to be dead? How was it that my entire family was in the same room on a random evening in March, when that was generally a phenomenon that occurred only on designated national holidays? Everything was out of control, the aura of darkness and silence that surrounded my family had been pierced, and we were all at a loss for understanding. While I had absolutely no idea how it would play out, I knew at a level beyond articulation that the truth of our lives was about to be exposed. Every lie would be unraveled, every shadowy corner lit. And despite the fact that I had dreaded this moment my entire life and had done just about everything in my power to prevent it from coming about, I felt, for the first time ever, that I could breathe. An indescribable sigh of relief washed over me, and I finally handed the wheel to someone else.

It was over—and yet, it was just beginning.

I was in and out of that particular unit more times than I remember over the next year. The director of the unit eventually left to start a private practice and I was her first patient; I saw her twice a week for nine years. I’m eternally grateful to the St. David’s staff and to Shannon, my therapist, because they not only saved my life but they showed me that there are people out there who won’t fuck you up or fuck you over; something I never knew before  then. When I moved to Houston I found another amazing therapist named Krista who helped me recover from my eating disorder and do the rest of my trauma work. The people at Castlewood Treatment Center also played a major role on my recovery. Everyone I’ve met, all of the women (and men!) I’ve had the honor of sharing this journey with have changed me for the better. My mom, as ever, is my biggest support. And my best friend Camilla—thank you for every time you got pissed at me for fucking up my life, because you were totally right. I love you. Every day I am grateful that I didn’t succeed with my plan, that there were people who cared enough to do something to stop me. Suicide is never, ever the answer. As long as you are still breathing, there are options. As long as you are alive, there is hope. And whether you know it or not, there is always someone out there who cares; you are not alone.