So when I went to see the therapist for the first time, I was sort of excited. I was proud of my cuts and forming scars, and I looked forward to a venue that would allow me to show them off safely. I was interested to see how the doctor would judge the severity of my cuts in comparison with others she had seen.
I had my first appointment a few days later. The therapist immediately asked me to pull up my sleeves. I displayed my forearms proudly and fed her all the information I thought she might want to hear about why I was doing this. In reality I had absolutely no idea. I spouted off things about my parents’ divorce and the hardships of high school. She nodded and eagerly scribbled notes. Although I had cut myself pretty badly, I was startlingly articulate and so full of shit that it passed for self-awareness. I knew what to say and how to say it to make therapists, doctors, and even my parents think I was on the up and up. No one, not even I, came close to realizing the extent to which I was affected by this illness.
At our second session I agreed to stop cutting and the therapist instilled in me a passionate new identity. Making people happy was very appealing, so I dropped the personae of self-destructive teen and took on that of a young person in recovery. I decided never to cut again, and I was proud of my reformation. My parents breathed a huge sigh of relief, and I became the perfect daughter, who went through a little rough spot, but overcame the experience completely.
I celebrated six weeks of not cutting with my therapist who even bought me a cake. We each ate a slice as we talked about potential boyfriends in my life. My “normal and happy” act was thick, but I was beginning to unravel underneath it all.
One day my parents and I fought. Instinctively, I dug through the bathroom drawer for a razor. I tried to pull an individual blade out of the four blade series. In my fury I quickly gave up and used the entire thing, dragging it sideways across my arm. I screamed as I cut, and, as if I couldn’t see through the curtain of my fear and rage, everything was blurry. The resulting cuts covered a lot of surface area, and even though they were not very deep, they were visually satisfying. Each cut from each individual razor left a visible wound and they really hurt. I put on a dark long-sleeved shirt and let the blood soak through.
My mom ran upstairs to quiet my screaming. There was no lock on the door, so I used the bulk of my body to keep the door closed. I was terrified but knew that I had to do everything in my power to keep her from entering. The bathroom looked like a murder scene. There was blood splattered across the white counter and the tiled floor. My mother sensed this was not a typical tantrum; her motherhood adrenaline won out and she pushed the door open. She made me pull up my sleeves and she washed and dressed the wounds, all the while threatening to take me to the hospital.
We both knew full-well I was not going to the hospital; self-inflicted wounds of this magnitude would have had me institutionalized. There was a new terror in her eyes and we both knew things were escalating, although neither of us admitted it.
A few weekends later, in late September, my best friend Stephanie and I went to a concert at a club in Washington with her cousin, Will. It was a weekend, but because the concert would end late, we were going to spend the night at Will’s house, with our parents’ permission, since he lived in the city, just a few blocks from the club.
Will picked us up at Stephanie’s house in Silver Spring, and because I was in tenth grade and had never ridden in a car driven by a peer before, I was thrilled. Will was a year older and recently moved to Washington from San Francisco, which only added to his allure. About ten minutes into the ride I decided that this shy boy with hunched shoulders and blue eyes had to be my boyfriend.
We drank beers in the parking lot with Will’s stepbrother John before the concert started. I never felt so cool. These were the people I wanted to be friends with; I felt older than my fifteen years. A new group of friends would rectify my suffering social status at school by removing me altogether from that social scene.
Once in the club my friends and I danced to beats that resonated deep inside our chests. Tendrils of smoke curled off the sea of lit cigarettes and made it almost impossible to breathe. Will stood behind me the entire time, occasionally swaying awkwardly to the music. Aware of his presence, I was self-conscious of every move I made. I felt a rush of excitement every time I summoned the courage to turn and ask him some mundane question. When he finally asked me if I wanted to go for a smoke with him I felt like I had made some headway.
After the show was over we went back to his house and drank bad sangria out of the bottle. His parents had gone to bed. We watched a movie and I went through the prescribed teenage flirting protocol, looking through his wallet, snuggling up next to him, holding his hand.
Stephanie and John had fallen asleep, so Will and I went upstairs to his room. We kissed for a while, and I thought I had finally broken through his friendly reserve. I was so drawn to him and his quiet mystery. Unlike other boys I had dated he wasn’t purposeful in anything he did. There seemed to be complexity lying behind the flatness of his eyes. His obvious discomfort with the outside world didn’t bother me; he was still older and therefore cooler. I was desperate to make it official.
With some slight urging on my part, Will and I were officially “a couple” a few weeks later. I battled his indifference with my insistence. We spent all of our weekends together and I found comfort just driving along in his mother’s black Volkswagen with the heat blasting on my face.
I didn’t tell him about the cutting, and if he saw the cuts he never asked, but there was a certain despondency in all of our interactions. Our morose phone conversations began as what seemed like simple teen angst. Gradually our talks went on for hours. When we were together, we physically clung to one another with unspoken need. Because of the depression, neither one of us slept much anymore, which allowed for late night calls. I would sit, curled up in the dark and whisper, hoping that my mom wouldn’t hear. By Thanksgiving we were saying “I love you,” another stage of our relationship brought about for the most part by my perseverance. The relationship was the only facet of my life in which I found stability and control.
Even with Will there to hang on to, I was slipping. My grades dropped and my depression overwhelmed me. My arms were entirely covered with crusty scabs and I was grateful for the cold weather so I could wear long sleeved shirts all the time. My therapist, who asked to see my arms at every session, also seemed overwhelmed by the damage I was inflicting upon myself.
Everything was just sort of numb; my smiles were cold and forced, the falseness of my own laugh made me cringe. Getting out of bed every morning was an excruciating process. If I made it to the shower I would often sit under the water with my knees hugged to my chest and cry.
My absences at school were accumulating, every day it seemed that I came up with a new ailment allowing me to spend the day under the safety of my covers. I developed an aversion to the mere sight of my high school. Getting off the bus in the morning, eyes burning with exhaustion, my stomach would pitch with dread. I was listless in class, and thought only of cutting as I picked at the scabs.
I never thought of doing it at school, my cutting routine was too ingrained and too perfect. The bathroom, with its mysteriously sticky floors, was permeated with the smell of heavy floral perfume and stale urine—an unacceptable environment for such a sacred ritual. I saved my need to cut, packed it down for later, and congratulated myself for my endurance.
It was a Friday and Stephanie and I had decided to go to Will’s house after school. My mom had begun to sense something unsettling in my interactions with Will, and when I told her my plans she refused to allow me to go. I felt too much contempt to even fight the decision and made plans to go anyway, against her wishes.
Will and a classmate came to pick us up at the end of eighth period. Will was driving the Volkswagen, the interior smelled like beer. We all piled inside and sped off to his house. About half an hour later my mom called. She tracked me down through Stephanie’s mother a
nd Will’s mom confirmed I was there. My mom’s voice on the phone was rife with anger and fear, demanding that I come home and citing the many consequences for my insubordination. I refused, my voice rising with rage.
After cutting, fighting was the only other time I felt alive anymore. It filled me with anger and even dread, but it brought color back to the seemingly permanent sallow of my existence. My mom gave me half an hour to get home; otherwise, she said, “I’m calling the police.”
Going home seemed the best option. I didn’t want to involve anyone else in my family fight and I felt the familiar, desperate longing to lose myself in the situation. I longed to get to the point after the fight when my throat was sore, but everything was resolved.
Inside my brother met me with the “you’re in so much trouble” smirk. My mom, in a livid whisper, told me to go to my room. I ran up the stairs, pounding the walls and banisters with flushed hands. My eyes flooded with tears and my heart raced. I felt a wave of panic as I watched from my bathroom window as Will drove off.
I found my razor and dug into my skin and dragged. Chunks of scabs were scraped away first and I piled them in the sink. The lines weren’t so neat anymore; I went for whatever clean skin I could find. With the razor it always hurt more, and tonight that was exactly what I wanted. I had learned not to scream, even in my blinding rage, because I certainly didn’t want to be interrupted before I was finished.
Cutting was a time warp, and I had been at it for almost an hour. The time on the clock shocked me when I finally emerged, but I was elated. I put on the ceremonial dark, long-sleeved shirt that was still stiff from last time.
A few minutes later, reality set in and I wanted to get out of the house. I walked downstairs, my face no doubt swollen and tear stained, and went for the front door. My mother noticed and came toward me, blocking my path. I pushed past her, told her I needed to take a walk, and she eventually gave up. We aimed at some degree of normalcy as my brother and sister looked on.
Outside the sun had set and the chill was bitter. I had refused a jacket and so I ran down the steep incline of our street to warm up. At the bottom there was a creek, protected on the roadside by thin, vine-tangled bushes. I pushed through them, feeling thorns through my clothes and made my way down the sandy bank. The moon was bright and I crouched down about a foot from the tiny creek. I could no longer be seen from the road, but I could watch the occasional car drive down the quiet suburban street.
The tears started again and I spoke to myself. My own voice was startling, hoarse and rough. I asked to die. Even though I was far from religious, I was pleading with God to stop my pain. The request was terrifying. It was the first time I had ever admitted the depths of my anguish. It took on its own momentum the more I said it and I felt more sure with each repetition. I thought about staying out and freezing to death in the cold, but then I saw the brake lights of my family’s Honda round the corner twice. The sight brought me back to the surface of things, and all I felt was normal teenage anger. I waited for twenty minutes or so and then made my way back to the house.
I walked back in the door and saw that my parents were absolutely exhausted. My stepfather told me how they had looked for me, how scared they were. Then my mom had her turn. Somewhere in the middle of her speech I broke down. I told them how utterly unhappy I was and how hopeless everything seemed. Just the telling brought instant relief. I finally felt like things would change. They promised we would beat this together, and we pledged to get along. My parents hugged me and I even begrudgingly hugged back.
Will called later that night. He kept saying how worried he was about me. I finally confessed to him about the cutting and the depression. I asked him if he had ever been depressed and he told me he had been. He also told me he wasn’t doing so well, and we promised each other we’d get help. I made him promise to get some medication and he made me promise to stop cutting. The fact was that he understood and I felt hopeful for the first time in a long while.
Will had told his mother he needed help. He started seeing a doctor and went on the Prozac. Will wasn’t the most willing candidate for therapy, but he continued going, he said, for medication management.
At my next session I told my therapist that I needed more help. She agreed and said she had been thinking I was suffering from moderate depression for a while. She gave me the name of a psychiatrist and suggested I look into medication. On my sixteenth birthday I started taking Zoloft. I swallowed the first tiny pill in the psychiatrist’s office before going to school. Taking a pill to make me happy made me nervous, but I was in such a hopeless place it seemed my only option.
I felt the results within a week. My mood was completely different and I had motivation again. I wanted to go out and do things and I checked back into school and friends. By Christmas I was feeling like everything was going to be fine.
But the therapeutic benefits of the medication didn’t last long. Sometime after Christmas I came crashing down again. I started cutting again, and with it, the indiscriminate crying that could last for hours. The doctor increased my dosage, but I was troubled by side effects. My mouth was dry and my center of balance was gone—and I was still depressed. But this time it was worse than before. After a brief run at being happy I knew depression wasn’t a way of life, and the disappointment of the temporary lift was crushing.
Cutting had become a drug, and I needed to increase the dosage. My younger brother had gone through a phase playing at becoming a Navy Seal and props for his fantasies included an extensive collection of knives. By now he had moved on to video games, but the knives were stowed in an old cigar box on his shelf. No one had thought to hide knives; no one would think that my desperation would ever reach that far.
I went into his room and selected one. It was a single switchblade fashioned from sturdy, matte steel. The blade was serrated and slightly tarnished, with bits of sap and flecks of rust adulterating the metal. I chose it because of the power it seemed to wield, and because the tip had been broken off and I thought my brother might not miss it if he ever went through his collection again. This knife, I decided, was only for use in special situations. I couldn’t have too many cuts on my arms that needed stitching at one time. Infection, I had read, was something to worry about with that many open wounds.
In the New Year, Will and I fell back onto each other. I would physically enclose myself in him when we were together, crawling onto his lap with my face buried in his shoulder. Inhaling him, the scent of second hand smoke and manly deodorant, seemed to lull me to a brief place of peace. The two of us huddled desperately on the cheetah print futon in his basement, pointedly ignoring each other’s instability. We were afraid to let go, even for a second. In the car he gripped my hand with his sweaty palm in between shifting gears.
I confided in Will. I would tell him when I cut, when I wanted to give up completely. He would hold me and often talk me out of it. Sometimes he even managed to persuade me that things would be okay. But Will hid his own unhappiness. I knew when he wasn’t doing well because he would phone me in the middle of the night. I had my own line and I would keep the phone by my head in case he called, and when he did I would jump from my slumber.
The conversations weren’t deep; it involved a lot of probing on my part to get the most basic information about how he was feeling out of him. His voice, normally subdued and halting, would be small those nights, and had a frightening edge of desperation. He begged me to take care of him, make me promise to never leave him. I promised, knowing I didn’t have any resources to help him. For me the relationship was the picture of perfect intimacy, and it seemed miraculous that in the midst of our pain we had found one another.
On one of Will’s bad nights, he tried but couldn’t get a hold of me. He bit a chunk out of his forearm. When I saw the bandage he matter-of-factly explained that he had taken a deep bite of flesh from his arm and then spat it out. He lifted the bandage to reveal a bloody indentation. Maybe he was falling faster than I was, and altho
ugh I was terrified, I was at the same time relieved. I wasn’t the sickest person in our union, and somehow the thought was reassuring.
One afternoon in mid-January Will called. There was unusual background noise, clattering, unfamiliar voices, something that sounded like an intercom. He explained he was in a mental institution. He sounded fine, and was quick to make light of his situation. I burst into tears. He told me that his hospitalization wouldn’t impinge on our relationship, he’d still call. He’d be out soon.
I ran downstairs and told my mom, who hugged me and told me “That’s where Will needs to be.” I could feel her body soften with relief to know that Will was out of reach. Her daughter could now shed her dead weight of melancholia, and she probably figured I would improve with Will out of the picture.
I wish I had known then what I know now about the depths of Megan and Will’s bond, how intertwined the two had become and that the relationship hung on the symbiosis of their deep depression.
Jack and I had met Megan’s mother and stepfather on a few occasions, just to “get acquainted.” They were pleasant and easy to talk to, and honest about their concerns about Will’s depression and its potential impact on Megan. They had every right to be concerned. I don’t believe, however, they understood how deeply troubled their daughter was also. But we would find out soon enough as the two children continued their downward spirals.
6
BROKEN HEARTS, DEEP WOUNDS
Memo
Date: January 24, 2001
From: Gail Griffith
To: C. Adkins; R. Chase; Fr. Meehan; S. Place, D. Smith; C. Warren. Gonzaga College High School
Subject: Will D.
I want to report to you all that my son, Will D., was discharged yesterday afternoon from the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, where he had been hospitalized for the treatment of clinical depression.
Will's Choice Page 16