Those lucky enough to grow up in less lethal environments might have a hard time being able to comprehend how parents who are supposed to love their children can act so harshly. But the many, many people from venomous families understand exactly how I grew up. Insults, accusations, and callous cruelty marked my daily life. The life of my good girl, that is.
My bad girl was still being prostituted to men on a constant basis. But due to dissociation and amnesia, my host personality had no awareness of the abuse I endured. One of the strange things about dissociative amnesia: You don’t have to be aware of the abuse to suffer its effects. And I did suffer. Terribly. The sexual abuse, a horrid home life, and an identity disorder created a perfect shit storm of misery. I felt detached, dirty, depressed. Filled with shame and self-loathing. I felt utterly alone, which I was. There wasn’t a single person in my life to protect me. I was completely unloved.
—
I DID HAVE a soul mate, though. In my loneliness, I found Tommy by The Who. Tommy is a full-length rock opera about a boy who experiences trauma. After witnessing a murder, the young boy is instructed by the perpetrators (his parents) to block out the memory and pretend he didn’t see or hear anything. Tommy represses the awful memory, but it takes a toll on his psyche. He becomes a blind deaf mute, and retreats into a dissociative state that resembles a coma. In this weakened mental state, Tommy falls prey to evil family members. His sadistic cousin tortures him, while his pedophile uncle molests the boy.
Tommy is an opera about trauma and its effects. Tommy is horrified by the murder, making him susceptible to his mother’s suggestion to develop amnesia about the event. The physical symptoms he suffers are a classic case of conversion disorder, a psychiatric diagnosis that is closely linked to dissociation. In conversion disorder, patients “convert” their anxiety and unacceptable memories into physical symptoms.
For reasons that are obvious now, Tommy resonated with me. At the time, though, dissociative amnesia prevented me from understanding why I felt so connected to this character. I believe my fascination with Tommy was an early indication that my mind was trying to right itself by revealing things about trauma and dissociation to my consciousness. I wasn’t strong enough to face the full truth of my life back then; the shame would’ve killed me. Still, I couldn’t get enough of the album. I played it over and over again in the darkness of my bedroom, feeling the pain in every verse.
See me
Feel me
Touch me
Heal me
Tommy was lonely and isolated, abused and unloved. He had dark family secrets to hide. Nobody understood Tommy’s real pain. Nobody but me.
As I look back, it seems clear that I was depressed. At the time, though, I didn’t have a name for anything that was happening to me. All I felt was confusion and unbearable pain. I desperately needed help. I wanted someone to talk to, but no one seemed to care. It felt like no one gave a damn if I lived or died.
—
THESE FEELINGS WERE HEIGHTENED in the winter of 1982 when, at the age of thirteen, I got pregnant. I don’t know by whom. Condoms were never used when I turned tricks, and I wasn’t on any kind of birth control. So it could’ve been anyone. I’m not sure how far along I was when Gary figured it out. All I know is: One day that winter, I fainted. It was out of the blue and something that had never happened to me before. For Gary, I assume, it was a tip-off. I don’t remember any pregnancy test, nor do I remember any queries about the frequency of my periods. (That’s not to say these things didn’t happen. Again, because of the dissociative amnesia I suffered, there are aspects of my childhood I still can’t recall.)
What I have always remembered, quite vividly, is waking up one morning to a nightgown full of blood. Horrified, I tried to get out of bed but fell to the floor instead. I tried to stand up, only to realize I was too weak. Meanwhile, I became aware of the fact that I was bleeding heavily from my vagina, but I had no idea why. Clearly, something had happened to me the night before. But because of the dissociation, I had no recollection of it. I woke up that morning as the good girl—the girl who didn’t know she was being sexually abused. Thus, I truly had no idea what was happening to me.
Concerned about the blood and the mess it was making, I somehow managed to crawl across the living room into the kitchen. I pulled a Ziploc bag out of a cabinet, then made my way back to my room. All the while, I felt faint and weak. Back in my bedroom, I propped myself up against a wall, put the Ziploc bag between my legs, and watched in horror as it filled with blood clots. Overcome with shame and disgust, I didn’t want to tell my parents. The blood wouldn’t stop, though. I was terrified.
Ultimately, I decided that I had no choice but to seek help from my parents, who were both in my father’s home office. To do this, I had to crawl across the living room again. But I was weaker by then and starting to lose consciousness. By the time I got to my parents, I was as white as a ghost and could not stay conscious for more than a few minutes. I didn’t tell my parents about the hemorrhaging, although my mother could see the blood on my nightgown. I told her I was having my period. She got me cleaned up and dressed, then drove me to the local country doctor, an old man with an examination room in his basement. During the examination, I fainted again. When it came time to give a urine sample, I was so weak that my mother had to hold me over the toilet bowl. Blood poured into the plastic cup along with the pee, but my mother explained this to the doctor as menses. After providing my blood pressure and a urine sample, my mother drove me home. Still too weak to walk, I missed school for more than a week.
My mother attributed the whole incident to hypoglycemia, claiming that this was the doctor’s diagnosis. Meanwhile, I continued to secretly collect blood clots in Ziploc bags for another full day. I was so scared by the bleeding that I eventually confessed it to Gary. It might seem strange that I would confide in him instead of my mother, but this is the nature of dissociation. While my conscious mind didn’t know why I was bleeding, my subconscious mind knew Gary was the cause.
Over the years, there were several times when I sought Gary’s help for physical problems related to the abuse, all the while having no conscious recognition of the abuse or Gary’s part in it. I would tell him of various contusions or lesions on my genitals. He would then have me disrobe and lie on a bed so he could examine me and perhaps apply some type of medicine. These were murky times for my psyche. My good girl was having her genitals examined by her father—a father she had no idea abused her. Yet somehow denial kept the strangeness of the situation at bay. As I look back, these murky times provide clear evidence that Gary knew about my dissociation and used it to his advantage.
When I told him about the bleeding, for instance, he knew damn well what was happening and why. But my very asking meant that I didn’t know, that somehow I had blocked out a major event that had happened just a few nights before. So when my good girl worriedly said, “Daddy, I keep bleeding down there,” and showed him the Ziploc bags, his response was not to speak of an ended pregnancy. Instead, Gary asked me if I ever put my fingers down there. Ashamed, I admitted that I did. My father told me that the bleeding was caused by my own masturbation. This frightened me so badly that my good girl didn’t put anything down there for years. Instead, I went on believing that masturbation causes hemorrhaging and that I was hypoglycemic well into my college years.
Later, as my dissociative amnesia eased and I began to regain my memory, I realized that the bleeding had been caused by a homemade abortion. I remembered my father sitting at the head of our dining-room table while I lay there watching him untwist a wire coat hanger. I distinctly remember him explaining the procedure to me and showing me how the hanger had to be bent on the end just so.
Ten years later, I would be the one demonstrating how to prepare a coat hanger as I sat across a table from Gary, my mother, and our lawyers at a deposition for a civil case I initiated against my parents.
&n
bsp; During that deposition, I got the opportunity to review the country doctor’s records from that bloody morning. He noted the blood in my urine, my exceptionally pale skin, and the fact that I had fainted during the examination. He also noted my dangerously low blood pressure, which, in a fainting thirteen-year-old, should have been cause for great alarm. There was no mention of hypoglycemia. I don’t know what the doctor thought was going on, nor do I know if he suggested that my mother take me to the emergency room.
All I know is: I’m lucky to be alive.
—
AT THE TIME, I didn’t feel so lucky. I felt nothing but despair. With no relief in sight and no hope of a better future, I got it in my head that I wanted to die.
Suicidality is common among adolescents and adults who have been abused as children. For those who have never contemplated it, I’m sure that taking one’s own life is hard to fathom. It goes against our basic animal instincts as human beings. DNA programs us, above all, to fight for survival. Suicidal people are no different in this regard. Personally and professionally, it’s been my experience that suicidal people very much want to live. What they don’t want is to be in pain. They see suicide as the only way out.
No one wakes up one morning and decides to kill himself on a whim. Suicide is the solution to a problem, usually a long-standing and dire one. Whether the problem is physical (chronic pain, illness), financial (debt, job loss), social (loneliness, loss), emotional (depression, anxiety), or a combo platter, the suicidal person feels like they have run out of options. They no longer have hope that things can improve.
That’s how I kind of felt after the abortion. I say “kind of” because I was on the fence. While there’s no doubt I was lonely, isolated, and morbidly depressed, deep down I was still looking for someone to save me. I think a lot of people with suicidal tendencies are like that—at least in the beginning.
In my attempt to find a rescuer, I wasn’t shy about sending up flares. At school, I wrote endless dark and brooding poems that weren’t subtle.
One untitled poem reads:
My life is not all that I want it to be.
The pressures . . . are too much for me.
I can’t help feeling that life must cease
to get that feeling of true, true peace.
Life for me is a burden to bear.
Does anyone care? . . .
I am at the edge of the deep, blue sea.
I can take the final plunge,
and that’s what scares me.
Dropping the not-so-sophisticated metaphors, a poem called “The Last Night” reads:
The only way to escape the pressure is to commit-
Suicide.
I want to die.
I cannot deny . . .
I want someone to touch me.
I want someone to hear me.
I want someone to feel me . . .
I’m Tommy, hidden from everyone.
There’s no one here to save me now . . .
I really don’t have a reason to live . . .
There’s no use in pretending.
It’s a pre-death note I’m sending . . .
I can’t take my life much more . . .
I’ve reached
The End.
My state of mind was obvious, and in sharing my writing with friends and teachers, I was desperately trying to be heard. Most suicidal people do this; they make the proverbial “cries for help.” I did so particularly loudly. In art class, I drew pictures of tombstones, knives, and nooses. In music class, I sang angst-filled songs. I glued pictures of celebrities who had killed themselves to the front of my notebook. But no one seemed very concerned with a morbid eighth grader. Not friends. Not teachers. I never got sent to the guidance counselor or the school psychologist or anything like that.
There’s a saying: “People who talk about suicide don’t kill themselves.” It’s entirely false. Most people who attempt suicide talk about it quite a lot beforehand, either indirectly (“Sometimes I wish I’d never been born.”) or directly (“I want to kill myself.”). I think the problem for would-be helpers is that they don’t know what to do. What’s more, suicide is taboo. Like rape and sexual abuse, it’s not the sort of thing we discuss in polite company. So, feeling uncomfortable and put-upon, bystanders too often choose to ignore the signs.
When I was in high school, I wrote an autobiographical essay about suicide for an English class. It says, “For the first time, I knew of an alternative to all of life’s problems—death . . . SUICIDE—it sounds so powerful. It’s so glorious, yet so final . . . Once you’ve experienced anything suicidal, life’s already over . . . Anyone who knows suicide is already lying in the pine box.” Pretty alarming stuff, but rather than ask to speak with me about this very disturbing piece (or the many other pieces about depression and death that I penned), the teacher chose to critique my prose.
“Somewhere,” she wrote, “your piece is misleading to the reader. You start out with this thing about popularity . . . then you move to this friend and are sort of vague . . . then you talk about suicide.” I was fifteen years old and expressing a barely shrouded wish to die. Yet this teacher didn’t talk to me. She didn’t send me to a guidance counselor or the school psychologist or do anything. Yet I’m sure that if I’d actually killed myself, she would’ve been one of the many people saying, “How tragic! If only I’d known!”
What chance do abused, neglected, and/or depressed teenagers have if their own teachers ignore direct pleas for help?
Suicide is the third leading cause of death among kids aged ten to fourteen, and the second among teens and young adults. From personal experience, I can easily see why. In the early 2000s, I began teaching English at an inner-city high school in Los Angeles. The first essay I assigned was a piece about the students and their lives. Most of the stories involved run-of-the-mill stuff about parents, siblings, and teenage love. A few, though, revealed depression and even abuse. Concerned, I told a seasoned teacher who trained all of us newbies. She was well aware of the serious troubles facing many of the students. “That’s why I never assign anything autobiographical,” she said. “Then I don’t have to deal with it.”
—
NO ONE WANTED to deal with me or my feelings. Not my friends, not my teachers, and certainly not my parents. At home, I showed ample signs of depression—sitting in a darkened room for hours every day listening to Tommy over and over again. I wasn’t trying to hide my emotions. On the contrary, just like most depressed and troubled teens, I pulled out all the stops to gain my parents’ attention. I didn’t really want to die back then. What I wanted more than anything was love. My parents’ love. I was still young and naïve enough to believe gaining their love was possible.
All the signals in the world, though, don’t mean shit if no one’s around to see them. Gary was always out and about with his new child bride. And my mother was gone. This was during the time she left home indefinitely to tend to my dying grammy. I felt abandoned and completely alone.
Once summer came, life got worse. I had nowhere to go and no one to see. The isolation was staggering. With nothing to do from morning till night, I wallowed in depression, spending most days in my pitch-black bedroom. I was a copious diary keeper during this time, leaving a permanent daily record of my worsening mental condition. It shows the struggle and obsessiveness that mark depression and suicidality.
July 4, 1982:
Today at 1:00 pm I don’t know if I really would have done it, but I had a knife & was thinking suicide. I just layed in my room and it was totally dark . . . I couldn’t even figure out why I was so depressed . . .
July 6, 1982:
Once again I’m thouroughly depressed. It seems sort of scary to only ever think about suicide. I have good reasons though. It would save me a lot of grief to just be dead.
July 10, 1982:
All I think about is suicide and remembering Pete [a boy I liked] is the only thing that keeps me from it.
July 11, 1982:
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I realized today, when my mom pointed it out, that I’m not good for anything and don’t care about anything either. There’s only one thing I care about & remembering him stops me from taking the knife out of the drawer.
July 12, 1982:
Suicide frightens me.
July 14, 1982:
I had the knife out and had started to cut my . . . I’m not sure if I would have gone all the way. I might have just stopped after a little blood . . . I still want to die. I feel funny like God’s watching me. The knife’s in my drawer. It’s gonna be a long night.
Around this time, my diary indicates that I traveled with Gary to work at some mall shows. While at one of the malls, I bought a bottle of over-the-counter sleeping pills. I got the idea after watching a documentary on Marilyn Monroe; it said she committed suicide via sleeping pills. In the age before Google searches, I didn’t realize that lethal sleeping pills require a prescription. I fully expected these would do the trick.
On August 4—just four days after returning home—I closed the door to my darkened bedroom, put a cassette in my tape recorder, and opened the bottle of pills. In the darkness of my room, I listened to Tommy while I swallowed one pill. Then I turned on the tape deck and recorded my feelings for posterity—my version of a suicide note. I waited one hour then took the next pill. Waited another hour, swallowed number three. I’m not sure why I chose to take the pills in such a tentative way. I suppose I was scared and ambivalent. After the first few pills, though, I loosened up. By the time evening fell, I was downing three or four an hour. I did this well into the night.
At some point, my father came home, but he didn’t bother to check on me. Not that he would’ve noticed much. I mean, it was nighttime, and I was lying in bed. I drifted in and out of sleep, but it was nothing like the deep nothingness I had expected. If anything, I felt jittery. My heart was pounding fast; I was sweating a lot. By the next morning, it was clear that my dramatic scene had not played out as planned. There was no unconsciousness, no discovery of my limp body, no rush to the hospital by hysterical, regretful parents who would finally realize the error of their ways. Just me, lying on my bed in a dark bedroom. Nearly a whole bottle of sleeping pills and nothing had changed.
Scared Selfless Page 10