Almost Lost: The True Story of an Anonymous Teenager's Life on the Streets

by Beatrice Sparks

  ROAD MAP TO MENTAL WELLNESS

  Answer questions with a number from 0 to 10: 10 being often, 0 being never.

  DESTINATION: WEEKS

  MENTAL ILLNESS: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

  1. I love and respect myself

  2. I love and respect others

  3. I feel happy and peaceful

  4. I enjoy being with others

  5. I enjoy being by myself

  6. I am positive

  7. I am optimistic

  8. I trust myself

  9. I trust others

  10. I know the difference between real and fanciful fears

  11. I am not easily irritated

  12. I am motivated

  13. I enjoy my job, school, or whatever I am doing

  14. I am not critical

  15. I am appreciative

  16. I can make good decisions

  17. I do not feel inferior

  18. I do not feel hopeless

  19. I do not feel helpless

  20. I am not impulsive

  21. I am not obsessive

  22. I am not hostile

  23. “Down times” do not last more than two or three days

  24. Life is exciting, challenging, and fun

  25. I look forward to a happy, successful future

  Check your answers and YOU DECIDE if you are on the MENTAL WELLNESS ROAD.

  Do you want to change some of your habits and thinking patterns? Do you think you should? Are you going to make the changes? If so, when? Is there a better time than now?

  Check your answers once a week and if you are willing to WORK for change and positive growth there will be change and positive, happy, fulfilling, growth!

  SUMMARY OF SESSION

  Before Sammy’s school started, he called two boys he grew up with and asked them to help him back. Dr. Davidson, the new principal, was once a gang member. He has sent all gang members to an alternative school. Sammy was given SELF-EVALUATION ROAD MAP QUIZ exercise papers so he could evaluate his own state.

  Samuel Gordon Chart

  Friday, September 9, 3:30 P.M.

  Eighth Visit

  SAMUEL (SAMMY) GORDON, 15 years old

  NOTE: A message was left on the answering service voice mail. Sammy, sounding like he had been flattened by a steamroller, said he had to see me right away! I returned his call and suggested he come over as soon as possible. I never take lightly anyone’s cries for help, particularly someone who is, or has been, suicidal.

  “Who emptied your emotional tank?” I asked gently.

  “It’s a long, cold, black story.”

  “I can see and hear that you are hurting deeply. Let’s tend to your wounds without wasting time.”

  Sammy crumpled into my La-Z-Boy chair and sobbed like a small child, his body contorted with suffering. For a long time I rubbed his head, neck, and shoulders. His muscles were taut, as tense as metal springs. Softly I started whispering to him. “Relax…let go…unwind…release the pressure. You’re safe and protected…relax, relax.” I began putting finger pressure on his shiatsu nerve centers.

  “It’s okay to cry, Sammy. It’s even good to cry. It’s pressure relieving and a natural response for relinquishing pain. Don’t be ashamed or embarrassed. Be grateful that you have someone you trust enough to completely open your soul to and that you can cry around. You know I understand and care, don’t you?”

  Through his lessening sobs he sniffled, “Yeah.”

  It was some time before Sammy could talk. When he did the words tumbled out in such a jumble that they hardly made sense. Little by little the words began to string together into a semblance of sentences—agonizing, excruciating utterances that can only be completely understood by those who have suffered through truly deep depression.

  “I wanted out,” he said. “I wanted to do it! I felt I had to! I just didn’t know how. My life isn’t worth shit, nothing is. I’m certainly not worth shit to anybody, including myself.”

  “Whoa, boy. Relax and back up a bit. I know something has happened to distort your thinking, and that’s all right. Massively distorted thinking has happened to many people long before you and will happen to many people long after you. Let’s explore what got your thinking so out of whack. But first let me congratulate you.”

  “Why would you want to congratulate me?”

  “Because no matter how depressed you were or how distorted your thinking was, you didn’t lose your control completely.”

  “You just think I didn’t.”

  “No. You didn’t do it. You might have thought about suicide, but you didn’t try it—or did you?”

  “No…”

  “And you came to me to sort of…”

  “Get my brains unscrambled?”

  “You could have tried to run away from your new problem, whatever it is, couldn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I am smart enough to know now that even if I did, no matter where I went, I’d take the problem with me.”

  “See why I’m proud of you? You don’t keep your brains in your pocket.”

  “It seems I do most of the time.”

  “Stop it! You are talking about a kid I admire and respect much more than he ever suspects! He’s neat and he’s cool and he’s bright and he’s good. So, he does goof up once in a while; we all do! It’s part of being a member of the human race.”

  “I’m dropping out of the race.”

  “It’s not that easy, friend. In the race of life you’ve got to expect some mountains and some alligator- and poisonous snake-filled swamps.”

  “I’m too tired and mixed up for all that goody-goody, look-for-the-good crap.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re doing here. I’m the queen of goody-goody, and if you’re happy, or at least content, to stay where you are, I can’t stop you. Nobody can.”

  A single big tear sneaked out of Sammy’s right eye. “Please stop me! Please help me escape from the deep black, no-way-out pit I’ve dug myself into again. I don’t know how I got from where I was to here. It happened sooo fast. Last time I did it, I let the black pain whop me. Then I tended it and nourished it and babied it until it grew bigger than I was. After a while, it literally became my dictator and slave master. This time the black pain came all at once like an avalanche, completely burying me, body and soul.”

  “Something must have triggered it, dear Sammy. Don’t you honestly know what caused this self-destructive relapse?”

  “I know,” he said sadly.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  His head fell down on his chest, and his body tightened.

  “Do you think you should talk about it?”

  Silence.

  “Is it possible you must talk about it before you can relieve the pain and stress and find the secret passage out of the darkness?”

  He sighed so deeply that it seemed to come from his toes. “I can’t! Well, maybe I can. I’ll do whatever you want.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Sammy. Remember, I can’t take responsibility for your life. You must want to do whatever it is you should do!”

  “There isn’t any other way?”

  “There is no other way! All of us have to accept the consequences for each of our actions: Positive rewards for positive actions and negative penalties for negative actions. Does that compute?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So? What was the action or thought, or whatever, that caused you to again dredge up your old rotting garbage and willfully wallow in it?”

  “How did you know I’d done that?”

  “It was easy. You were emotionally reeking with the stench of all your old fetid sewage.”

  “Looks like the first time I had to face up to a consequence, I dived right back into the old black septic tank I’d just managed to climb out of, doesn’t it?”

  “And was it wise?”

  “No. But I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to escape from the humiliation, the embarrassment…the pain.”
/>
  “Did you?”

  “Hardly! Instead of escaping from all of it I compounded it a hundred million, zillion times.”

  “Smart move?”

  “Dumb move! One of my dumbest! Of all the stupid things I’ve ever done…the super stupidest!”

  “Want to vent exactly what happened?”

  “Well, it had been a while since I’d seen you, and I was feeling pretty good about myself and everything else. I’d apologized to all my old teachers, and Dr. Davidson and I were pretty tight, and Marv and Tommy and I were solid. I really thought I was making it big time and then…it’ll probably seem like a little thing to you.”

  “Not if it’s big to you.”

  “I’d seen Harmony in the halls a few times, and it was like I was being butchered inside. I wanted so much to do something…fall at her feet and grovel for her forgiveness…hold her close like I’d never let her go…kidnap her…all sorts of crazy things ran through my mind. I knew sometime I’d have to face her. I dreaded it in a way, but I couldn’t wait for it just as much.” Sammy stopped for a long time and agonized.

  “Tuesday, as I was coming out of Mrs. Procter’s class, I saw Mo walking down the hall looking like springtime and flowers and sunshine and all the other good things in life rolled up together in the most beautiful package in the world. I loved her so much I couldn’t breathe. She was like something spiritual, an angel or something coming toward me.

  “Then suddenly my head almost collapsed with the unbelievable memory of the day under the bleachers when, for absolutely no reason except pent-up hostility, I’d hit her, not once, but three times, hard. My right hand felt black and evil. I wanted to cut it off to show how mistaken I’d been and how sorry I was. Then I recalled every good thing that had ever happened between me and her. I don’t know how so much stuff could pass through my mind in such a short time.

  “I was about ready to smile when Chick Laddel, the guy the gang used to call ‘Chicken Little,’ rounded the corner and put his arm possessively around her. ‘Glad you’re back, Sammy,’ he said, in a way that seemed sincere. He turned to Mo. ‘Aren’t we glad he’s back, babe?’ Mo looked right through me as though I wasn’t even there. ‘Who? Where? I don’t see anybody, anybody at all.’ She put her arm tightly through his and pulled him away.”

  “How painful that must have been.”

  “It was like the bottom dropped out of my world right there, and I was sucked down into my old black, airless hole in one quick swoosh, down into eternal darkness. All the new lightness and the brightness were zapped, and my old bitter past entrapped me completely, strangling me in its black, musty, dirty, escape-proof net. I turned and walked out of school, and went home to my room, where I’ve stayed for the past few days, swallowed up by blackness and hostility and evil. Each feeding the other and multiplying and enlarging and devouring my body and my soul and my mind.

  “Mom thought I had the flu, and I gladly took anything and everything she gave me, looking for any kind of relief at all. I wished like everything that I had done the deed when I had had the chance. Mom had a little pistol hidden on the top shelf in her closet, but I couldn’t find where she had put the clip. I looked in the medicine cabinet, but there wasn’t anything there that would do the job. The black pain was excruciating.”

  “What else might you have done about it?”

  “Nothing. I was so defeated and deflated, I…”

  “Think carefully and slowly now. At that time what were you doing?”

  “I was…giving complete control of my thinking to…”

  “To what?”

  “To all the NEGATIVE POWERS that surrounded me.”

  “They had forcefully overcome you or YOU had willingly handed over to them your remote control power?”

  “I’m such a ratty, bratty boob tube.”

  “No! No, you’re just a normal person who hasn’t quite learned the secret of staying in charge of your life! Have you noticed that once you let a negative in, it becomes magnetic and attracts multitudes of other negatives which become even bigger and stronger and blacker and more malignant and cannibalistic? And the negatives come from every conceivable direction: up, down, north, south, east, west, over, under, and sideways.”

  “And it seems all the negatives a person has kept hidden or semicontrolled inside explode out as well.”

  “That is right on! Once you even move toward the NEGATIVITY TRAP—”

  Sammy interrupted. “Everything bad in the universe, both inside and outside, comes tumbling down around you. But what could I have done, both times when it seemed the world literally did come crashing in on my head?”

  “Each of us should, actually must, have an enormous retaliating positive arsenal safely tucked away in some remote place in our brains so that no negative mental monster will ever have the slightest chance of taking over! You’ve heard the old saying, ‘you can’t keep birds from flying over your head, but you can keep them from making nests in your hair.’ That’s exactly the way it is with negatives.”

  “Sounds good, but at this point I feel like dead meat.”

  I pinched his arm. “Oh, no, you’re not. See?”

  Sammy winced and let out a little squeak. “Okay, so the experience didn’t kill me!” He became very serious. “But it did completely cripple and defeat me emotionally.” He hesitated for a few seconds. “Now you’re going to say, What could I have done about it, right?”

  “Probably. What could you, what should you, have done immediately after the incident?”

  “Well, I could have called you.”

  “Yes, you know very well that you can call me any hour of the day or night. Or?”

  “I could have gone home and sat under my relighting-myself bright-light, because believe me, at that time every light in my life had gone out. I’d seen the look on Mo’s face. I knew she knew she’d mortally wounded me, and she liked it!”

  “Wait a minute. Let’s go over that one more time. Are you trying to justify putting the responsibility for your descent into depression on Mo?”

  “Of course not! It’s just that she’d wanted to humiliate me, hurt me, break me, so…Whoa…I can feel the enemy attacking. Where’s my arsenal? Okay, only positives can defeat negatives and drive away the darkness. POSITIVES! POSITIVES! POSITIVES! Mo was totally innocent! I was the one who hit her! I was the one who became hostile and impossible to be with. I was the jerk, the pit, the irresponsible…”

  “Hey, wait a minute. Are you in some irrational way trying to rationalize that negatives used on yourself don’t count?”

  “Umm, I guess I was trying to do that, wasn’t I? I need you around all the time to set me straight.”

  “No, you don’t! Tell me what you really need.”

  “To have more confidence in myself and my own judgments and to take a little more time and thought about what I think and say before I say and do!”

  “Have you ever tried talking to yourself?”

  “No, way! I used to see my grandpa do it, and old men who sit on park benches.”

  “Don’t laugh. Discussing things rationally with yourself can be therapeutic. If you had started a comprehensive conversation with yourself, like you and I have, you could have come to practically the same conclusions we came to.”

  “Is that really true?”

  “Yes. It’s really true.”

  “Are you saying that if I’d gone home after the Mo incident and I’d, say, sat under my bright-white-light and I’d tried to rationally and verbally sort things out, that I could have kept myself, through my own sort of self-therapy, from falling into the deep, black, funky pit that I’d dug and redug for myself?”

  “Almost surely! It’s better to talk to someone else if you can: your family, a friend, someone on a crisis hot line, a counselor, whatever. But if you can’t contact anyone else, make mental and verbal contact with yourself. We human beings are all a lot smarter and deeper than we give ourselves credit for being.”

  “It�
�s strange to think that I might have kept myself out of the depression party I invited all my old negative, mental monster friends to, and maybe not been tempted to go the suicide route. But that wouldn’t have helped me figure out how I could have handled the Mo thing.”

  “You were maybe expecting me to do that?”

  He halfheartedly laughed. “No, knowing you, I know you’re expecting me to do it by my poor, little, innocent, crushed, hurting self.”

  “Poor baby.”

  “Big baby! But I wouldn’t admit that to anyone else in the world if my life depended on it.”

  “You life doesn’t depend on it, so what might you do to get yourself out of the black corner you have painted yourself into?”

  “I could blow out…”

  “That’s not acceptable to you, I hope.”

  “No. Maybe I could beat up on Chicken Little.”

  “What would that get you?”

  “A few bangs and bruises and maybe I’d release some hostility.”

  “Would it change anything or solve anything?”

  “No, and even the thought is kind of childish. Let’s see, I could phone Mo, but I’m sure she’d hang up on me. Maybe I could have my mom talk to her mom. Oops! That idea is straight out of the cracker crock. I guess I could write her…maybe a long, long letter telling her the absolute truth about how I used to feel about things and then how I went through the dark times and now how I want so very, very, very much to be forgiven and to start over, just as friends. I don’t deserve to be more than a friend because how could she possibly trust me after…you know. Do you think that might work?”

  “Do you think it might?”

  “Maybe. At least it would clear my conscience a little and make me feel better in that regard. In fact, I feel a lot better just having talked it over with you. I mean myself! I’m going to try that crisis hot line thing sometime, too, to see if it works, and I may even try talking to my mom.” He grinned. “It’s a sure thing she’d be nicer to me than you are sometimes.”

  “You mean the times when I make you take responsibility for your own mistakes, and have you make your own good decisions?”

  “When did I ever do the good decision part?”

  “Super Sam, stop beating up on yourself! Remember, you’ve got to be your own best friend, coach, mentor, advisor, therapist, minister, promoter, agent, ego-inflater, booster, cheerleader, and everything else that is up-building and positive, all the things that will make YOU your best YOU!”