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July 23, 2015 - January 27, 2016
The face of Jesus stared at me with disgust.
Words can be used to accomplish something worthy. But words can also destroy. And, young lady, your tongue can slice like a knife.
You start playing with someone's head, and before they know it, you've got them convinced that they are so screwed up they can't get by without you. You make them dependent, blame everything on their parents, their dog, anyone but themselves. Absolve them of everything—for a fee—even though they are probably just plain lousy people.
When I was with the others, I did my best to appear in control. It was only holed up in my room, away from scrutiny, that I let the depression that was swallowing me show.
The drugs only blunted the edge, whereas I wanted to be completely wasted. Oblivious.
It was a series of human experiments, described in dressed-up clinical terms as “medication adjustments.” I adjusted to the new antidepressant and different anti-anxiety pills by throwing up, passing out, shaking uncontrollably, and hallucinating my way through a host of medications to find the right combination.
It was like being in a struggle for survival against a murderous foe, except I was the one who was fighting for survival and I was also the murderer within.
I was feeling, intensely feeling, and wondering just how much of it I could take.
“Borderlines,” as they were called, had an overwhelming inclination toward self-destruction. Ten percent of borderlines committed suicide; even more engaged in dangerous, impulsively self-destructive behavior. Chemical addictions and abuse marked the disorder, as well as reckless driving and eating disorders.
The prognosis was bleak, and a significant number of borderlines were destined to lead lives of turbulence. Lifetimes spent in and out of psychiatric wards, prisons, and institutions. Significant recovery from the illness was rare and almost always meant several years of intensive psychotherapy.
“And, as an adult, you have the freedom and the access to indulge in much greater forms of self-destruction than a two-year-old could ever have. You can drink and use drugs. You can smoke. You can be promiscuous. You can kill yourself if you want to, run into the streets at night, choose to eat everything in sight, or starve yourself. It's dangerous when the raw black-and-white emotions of a child are harbored in an adult's mind and body.
You'd just be enduring life instead of enjoying it.”
“Love is weak. Love is delusional optimism. It's a fairy tale. Hate always wins.”
A two-year-old can't fight fire with fire. A two-year-old is completely at the mercy of the adults around her.”
Is this how I was going to spend the rest of my life? Was I just a classic borderline personality disorder case, forever dependent on her therapist and psychiatric drugs?
A minipharmacy of little brown plastic bottles decorated my dresser—the anti-anxiety pills I swallowed six times a day, the nightly doses of antidepressants, and all the half-empty vials of medications my physiology could not tolerate. The prescriptions were so expensive I couldn't bring myself to throw them away. Yet I could not remember the last time I had awakened happy, the last time I had genuinely laughed, or the last time I had truly enjoyed myself.
Former pleasures meant nothing to me anymore. Life was a series of tasks to be endured, and even the simplest ones were painfully arduous. It took everything I could muster to cook a meal, wash the dishes, or do the laundry. My income was virtually nonexistent. My occupation was therapy.
At times I resented this ultimate punishment—being sentenced not to death, but to life.
“People can't always control their thoughts and emotions—only how they choose to react to them.”
I was weary of introspection. Yearning for simplicity, I found only more complexity. Slowly and painfully every layer of perception and distortion was unraveling. I feared there would be nothing at the core. A black hole.
If my mind began to wander again, I found a way to distract it. Stay busy. Get drunk. Get laid. Anything to escape the chamber of torture that was my mind.
It's important to get in touch with the child within you, but it's just as important that you maintain a sense of perspective. Otherwise you're not exploring your feelings; you are literally immersing yourself in them, getting lost in them. It's dangerous to do that.”
Dr. Padgett fumbled to reassemble the ballerina's arm, making it whole again. Maybe someday he can do the same for me.
If things had been different, who would I be? Beneath all the facades and distortions and faulty coping mechanisms, who was I?
As long as I kept to myself at home, did not openly disagree, followed the house rules, and showed up by curfew, it didn't matter what I did. Raising hell at school, getting loaded, getting high, screwing around—anything was fair play as long as I was a Stepford Child at home. I'd solved that dilemma by simply never being home.
“I could've been anything in the world. But I took the easiest route I could. Skipped half my classes in college because I was hungover or high or so exhausted from sleeping around that I couldn't make it.
I wasted the biggest opportunity of my life, getting stoned, getting drunk, and getting laid, like it was some kind of game.”
The burning fire and the dancing flames entranced me. Fire. The great power of warmth. The great power of destruction.
One of the reasons teenagers rebel is to test the limits to make sure they are still there. But for you it was particularly difficult. And something you never really got over.”
“The purpose of therapy is not to keep you here forever. It's not to make you dependent on me. That would be exploitation. In many ways from the very first session we've been working toward the day when therapy would no longer be necessary for you. If I didn't believe that, I'd only be hurting you, not helping you.”
Child abuse spans generations. The abused children, hurt and damaged, become abusive parents—who in turn abuse their children, who become abusive parents themselves. So the abusive sins of a parent can have a ripple effect to descendants twenty or thirty generations removed.”
If the walls were cracking, I'd plastered the surface back to smoothness. If the floor tiles were crumbling, I'd replaced them. If the roof was leaking, I'd patched the leaks. I'd pretended that, because the “house” still appeared okay, all was okay. Nothing had changed; all had been fixed. Nothing else needed to change.
Once upon a time, before therapy, I'd been an achiever, with promise and potential. Now I was a nobody, who could barely make it from one session to the next
Where were you, Jesus? Where was your Father? Where are you now? All along you could see what was happening. But you never stopped it. All along you knew. But you kept letting me go on, believing it was somehow my fault, hating myself passionately, tortured in a living hell. Couldn't you at least let me have some peace? Let me know it wasn't my fault? How could you have let me go on for so many years believing that?
“The best revenge is living well,” he finished. I'd heard the old saying before but had never really given it much thought. Was that wisdom or merely a consolation prize where justice is absent?
A few of the researchers seem to think that once a borderline, always a borderline. That you can't cure it—you can only control it. That a lot of people are destined to live their lives in and out of institutions, that there isn't much hope.
The only way to see the light at the end of the tunnel was to crawl through the mud in darkness.
