You are here: Home > Personal Stories > Moving On > Laura
Laura
Copyright, Laura
the world is grey today, i think. except for the trees, which are just beginning to blush their october shades of scarlet and copper, everything is grey.
the two police officers haven't said much since we left the hospital, and i'm relieved. i just don't want to talk. 12 hours in the emergency room, right after another 24 hours of precarious sanity, tends to drain a person. it's especially draining when "crisis intervention" becomes a household word. i couldn't bring myself to look at my mother as the police wound shackles and handcuffs around my ankles, my wrists. i knew i'd start to cry again. just as we left, i saw her standing solemnly in the parking lot, with her tired expression (the one she'd reserved for all five of my hospitalizations). all i could do was wave.
how did i get myself into this? by most standards, i was a very reserved 16-year-old girl. sure, i occasionally dyed my hair purple and favored a pair of jeans that i'd personally slashed the knees of, but i was a good kid. never touched so much as a cigarette, had a 3.4 GPA, a job at the veterinary clinic, a minor role in the play, chief of publicity for the school literary magazine. only to catch a glance at the underside of my arms, my legs, with purple bar-codes of scars, would one realize that "good girl" can come to be such a superficial label. or glance at my records from each of the three psychiatric facilities that i've been stuck in. or my journal, with its litanies of prayers for death, desires to endlessly slide sharpened blades down my arms.
i could blame others. i could blame my parents for not getting me help years earlier, when the first telltale symptoms of depression were manifesting themselves. i could blame my closer friends for ignoring my early suicide threats and when i came to school with crimson tally-marks of razorlines decorating my arms. i could blame middle school, the pubescent cesspool roiling with the big black girls and sauntering boys, who scorned me for being ugly, white, and an oddball. i could blame the line of militant math teachers or unruly math classes that caused my already wavering confidence in math to crumble. hell, i could blame the whole system for working out.
but it's me in these handcuffs. me with the burns on my flesh and the lacerations (inflicted with broken glass and scissors) scratched vertically down my wrist. a day or so after arriving at the hospital, i am sobbing and screaming at my mom and dad for my lack of intelligence, when the nurse comes in and queries me. she asks, "laura, i know you're upset and you might get angry at me for asking this, but when are you going to start taking responsibility for yourself?" my response is irrational and emotional, but it does not answer the question. only after my mom and dad have tearfully left and i have curled up in a corner, crying so hard that another nurse warns that they may have to give me oxygen if i cannot calm down, that i see the metaphorical corner i've boxed myself into. and that's when i realize that there's more to life i want than this.
first comes a change of schools. yet to come is residential treatment, maybe as close as tennessee, maybe as far as utah. but i know what i want. i want to enjoy my youth. there's a limited amount of years that i can really call myself "young", and why not spend them having fun? learning and growing from more than just negative experience? five years of hating the bejesus out of myself hasn't taught me any lessons that i'm very proud of. there's just gotta be some positive things to relish about being a teenager, even if on some days it's only that a better day will come. but if cutting gets in the way of that, one's not worth it. i think i've deicided which one is most important to me in the long run.