How I fell in love with the sadness
This story begins later than it should, somewhere between being crowned Homecoming Queen and coming clean.
It begins in my senior year English class. AP Literature, with the AP for nothing more than embellishment. There’s a common misconception among my friends that I was a good student. It’s not true, though—I never got an A in an academic class, except for choir, more than likely because it was my only class that didn’t take attendance.
There’s no strong introduction to be made to this story, just like there’s no tipping off point for my least favorite word, depression. It’s clinical and unromantic, and when there’s little you like about yourself, you’ll cling to the last dregs of glamour in your life.
And so, this story begins later than it should, when metabolic damage from years of disordered eating plus a long sedentary stint after a major surgery added 30 pounds to my body weight. Doctors dosed up my corpse with painkillers and let it swell up my skin. (Dead, to me, was subjective.)
I turned 18 years old alone in my bedroom after spending some of my favorite nights of my life wasted on Peach Schnapps and Everclear in my basement with some best friends and 100-odd strangers. Those polarities colored those years of my life.
At some point in that year—my senior year—I started to go what I can only call fucking crazy. And it was only a little bit more than before, but people started to notice. They’ll probably tell you it was the best year of my life. Like I mentioned, I was Homecoming Queen. I would walk out of school at 12 pm to fake-smoke cigarettes and put out the butts in slices of cake. I’d draw massive smiley faces on pop quizzes and turn them in blank, even when I knew the answers. I let my grades fall to near-zeroes, but still cried when I was rejected from Brown University because it confirmed what I had already suspected—that I was unremarkable. That was the last time I really cried. Then I hung up my college rejection letters, all 14 of them, on the fridge. I would ask people why we do anything, painful or gratifying, if we’re going to die in the end. I would ask that question with a smile on my face. I thought I might die in suburbia, and I felt okay about it either way.
Half the time I was screaming, and half the time I was silent. And that’s where this story begins. AP Literature. For a long time, I could never keep my mouth shut. I knew I was smart, so I showed off. I pulled 800’s on my SAT reading and writing sections every time. I gladly boasted my A+ papers, all written the night before. And then one day I went quiet.
I stopped speaking in class, I stopped turning in my assignments completely, I turned out the lights and probably stopped blinking.
There’s a million meaningful ways to interpret this, and all my other “crazy” behavior, and I’ve been through them all: I was crying for help. I was waiting for them to just let die. I was making them hate me so they would want to live without me. I want something to blame it on—the internet, Skins, sad songs, drugs, the lack thereof. I don’t know the truth. I’m not really sure there’s a truth to be known.
But one day, the light turned back on. I don’t remember the book we were reading, but I think it was a Toni Morrison. I don’t remember what I said during the discussion, but I imagine it was insightful. And when the bell rang, my teacher stopped me at the door and said to me, “Welcome back.”
“Welcome back.” It’s stuck with me for years now. And these days it’s weighing on me because it should have been the end of the story. But it never was.
This story begins later than it should because a lifetime of love and loss deserves to be more than a prologue. But a lifetime is what it is for everyone. We are individual experiences but a collective trope: We live. We learn. We laugh until we cry. We are sad until we are not.
This kind of sadness stays with you, and I learned to love it. It was the fuel for my eating disorder that whittled away at my bones until I had the body I thought I wanted. It let me write poetry that I thought was beautiful until I woke up in the morning. I would drink it up like honey but it always turned bitter in my mouth. Most days my skin feels like a vessel for this heavy nothing that I cannot verbalize. Other days I put it to work.
But Chester Bennington is the proximal point here, right? Chester Bennington killed himself, and all I can see is people urging others to ask for help, reach out, say something if they’re struggling. But what if the pain is home? What if each time someone reaches out to pull me up, it only tears away the only parts of me I know by heart?
It takes a certain level of maintenance to keep up despair. Like dusting off shelves, sometimes I keep my environment ideal for wallowing in self-pity. On the bad days, the lights never turn on in my room. Sometimes I can suck myself back in by closing the blinds. The darkness can come at any time, and it smacks me in the face and then kisses me on the mouth, and I feel at home in arms that hold me too tightly and bruise my bones.
What I mean to say is this: I am never permanently anything. I dragged myself up from the ground when it came to self-injury and my eating disorder, but these words carry little weight. I want to tell you my truth because Chester Bennington can be any of us on a day when we are not feeling saved. Happiness isn’t nirvana, and if it holds me up from dangling off the edge of the cliff, at some point its strength gives out.
You probably have seen my successes, or some version of them. I post them on my social media, I wear them like a kind of armor, I rehearse them in small talk. I want you to also see my failures, not only so I can’t hide behind them anymore, but also so that you know that no human is invincible or a mere sum of their parts. “Recovery” as we know it has a beautiful cadence, but is more accurately a kind of relearning how to pull yourself off, faster and stronger, from the ledge. This is my life as I have known it:
In eighth grade, I kept gauze and a pair of kitchen scissors under my pillow.
In sophomore year of high school, I lost 20 pounds over the summer while curating a secret Tumblr full of disgusting pro-anorexic content.
In senior year of high school, I drank copious amounts of alcohol, fake-smoked cigarettes and real-smoked marijuana. This was the last time I remember feeling interesting.
In freshman year of college, I re-carved the scars on my arm because I thought they made me interesting but covered them up so no one would ask questions.
Last fall, my junior year of college, I saved up my pills then Googled how many I would need to die. I had enough. I didn’t do it.
In the spring, just a few months ago, I threw up every meal I ate for two weeks.
Yesterday I didn’t eat all day. Today I am, as much as I can be, fine.
If that day where this story began was a “welcome back,” then every single day of my life has been going out and coming back in the same fucking doors. It’s days when the doors are too heavy to open, and the days I press my face against the glass imagining a way out. Some days it’s an automatic door. Some days it’s a revolving door. (How much can we overextend this metaphor?)
I have promised the idea of getting better to so many people, but it’s not something that I believe in per se. Reflecting on the most miserable times in my life usually feels like nothing more than a trick mirror. What I mean to say is that we are not strength or weakness. We can’t possibly be so simple. This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote less than a year ago in Cork, Ireland.
I hope I die here. I really hope I fucking die here. I’m not wasting away quickly enough and it is frustrating. I think if I died here, no one would find me for weeks. Maybe no one would find me at all. This is the perfect storm, and I am a coward, and alive or dead I am weak so is choice an illusion?
We are so, so immeasurably fragile. I am lucky to be able to read this and not recognize myself. But we are not static. I am stronger, but I am not strong. This version of myself could be me in twenty years or, god forbid, tomorrow. But at least in this moment, I feel some kind of clarity. The thing I want to remind you of is that there has been so much good, even in between these harrowing moments. I did get into college. I got a dream internship, and then a dream job. I’m the captain of my cheer team, for fuck’s sake. It’s idyllic, which is what makes me feel so ashamed to be so ungrateful.
I’m 21 now, and I spend a lot of time on the highway between the two points in Ohio. Left with this much time alone at 18, I wouldn’t have been able to last. That’s thinking time, and the deeper and longer you go into your own head, the more light you start to lose. You start asking yourself the meaning of things and come up dry. It’s the opposite of what we’ve been taught. A lifetime of education gave us answers and promised that the ones we didn’t have lay with science and religion. Neither can answer your own mind.
In a way, I feel too old for this now. When I was younger I believed the scars would fade, and now I worry that the wounds won’t even ever close. I could look up at a stage before and tell a stranger that they saved my life, and now I spend so much time looking at the floor and realizing that just because I’m alive doesn’t mean I’ve been saved.
Chester Bennington’s death scares me. It scares me that this may never end. It scares me that some days, I don’t want it to. I’m exhausted by the idea of hanging on by a thread forever. And I’m fucking terrified that this me, the one who sometimes can’t hold herself together for more than a week, is the body I am trapped in.
Sometimes I see visions of that fucked up girl in my dreams, emaciated but glowing in the pale light from the crack in the window, drunk and high as hell but she can still write poems that serve as a replacement for opening up her veins. Someone wants to love her back to life. She probably listens to Elliot Smith. She has my eyes.
I am not her. But in this moment, I am okay. And for now, I want to stay that way.
