How to Murder Your Life

by Cat Marnell

My brains were so scrambled you could’ve ordered them for brunch at Sarabeth’s;

so white that you could practically snort it like a line

I couldn’t go watch them alone, I thought, because people would know I was a loser.

I never called anyone. My primary relationship was with pills.

They were all nightcrawler vampires who raged until dawn and slept until dusk. This is terrible for the soul, but great for the skin—no sun damage, you know? So everyone looked good.

Oh, I just wanted to melt down like a Diptyque candle and die!

I was more of an accessorize-your-Juicy-Couture-sweatsuit-with-cigarette-burns kind of slag.

I thought it was all ugly as fuck, but hey, that’s high fashion, right? Blame Miuccia Prada.

The more amphetamine I took, the more fun being by myself was, actually. Speed was like magic! Lonely magic.

Slaggy prescription crackheads like moi

cracking her Hermès whip, it was an honor to jump. It was an honor to ask, “How high?!” And if the whip got so close it hurt, well, go in the closet, slather some sixty-nine-dollar Organic Pharmacy Rose Balm on your open wounds, and then get right back to work, you whiny baby!

(Is reading this stuff getting repetitive? Welcome to addiction.)

Pillhead honor code.

But God wasn’t feeling me.

Prescription-drug dependency sucked, but insomnia was even worse. Being clean just wasn’t worth it.

“I am VERY healthy and normal!” I wrote. Nev took the bait. Catfish.

Glitter was literally leaking out of her nose. Had she been snorting it? (Swag.)

we were deeper into the matrix than Keanu Reeves,

“BUT I ALSO THINK, ‘CAT, EVEN IF YOU DID GO OFF THE PILLS, NONE OF THIS WOULD BE DIFFERENT. YOU’D STILL BE A LOSER AND A MESS. YOU’D STILL—YOU’D STILL—YOU’D STILL HAVE NO F-F-FRIENDS. YOU’D STILL NOT HAVE A BOYFRIEND.’ I’M TOO SICK FOR ANYONE TO LOVE ME. I KNOW THAT. I’M NOT STUPID. I DON’T L-L-LOVE ME!”

My heart was going a million miles a minute. (Sorry to keep using that same clichéd expression—but this is an amphetamine memoir.)

But I didn’t want help. I was so tired of the fight inside of me.

All of this toxicity comforted me. It made me feel less alone.

I was out to the ball game, as the song goes—too gone to care if I ever came back.

God bless grandmothers.

octogenarians are sort of like junkies, you know? You can never be too confident that they’re going to make it through the night.

I stopped checking Mediabistro and Ed2010 Whisper Jobs. What was the point? I was an addict; I was unemployable.

Dr. X. cut my prescriptions in half! Thank God he was overprescribing me to begin with.

HOW DID THE crazy blond drug addict get through the forest? She took the psycho path!

they have grown like flowers—bright thoughts along the psycho path that I can pick and gather when the forest feels too dark.

my ambition is fighting back—against my addiction, against my self-destructive tendencies, against my death drive.