25 years: a retrospective (part 7)

24 February 1983

Yesterday me and Barb tried to solve a mystery about Andrea’s old house. Since Barb was here mom had to say yes when I asked if I could go down to her house to play Coleco Vision. I was doomed! I didn’t know how to play, not even Pac-man!! But she taught me how to play, it was fun.

30 April 1984

Nanny’s birthday was good. I was crying all night because of our [timed test]. I’m scared. Emily got a car. I’m grounded for playing out too long. I don’t feel good. Today’s gym and art. I HATE school. Let’s give Teela a hand. Tell a lie. Trouble is an awful thing to do. Tell a lie. Sorry.

P.S. Please make me pass.

27 September 1985

Ma and I got into a fight this morning because she doesn’t have the money to give me allowance. Now I can’t get crayons and colored chalk like I wanted. Why oh why do we have to be poor? I still didn’t get my clothes from layaway!

18/19 April 1986

Today was D.’s party. Since we weren’t invited to Angela’s snobby party, D. had one. First we saw Kristy’s show, Anything Goes, it was at Lebanon Valley College. Then we went to D.’s and watched MTV, ate candy and soda (I liked the Disney cookies) and ordered pizza. Later we composed a song, worked on the computer and took pictures and slept 4 hours. We then woke up and played “hide the money.” Later I went to Nanny’s so they could babysit me.

2 January 1987

My temperature was still 104 this morning but now it dropped to 102. It’s snowing really hard and I wanna go sledding but I can’t. That’s not fair!

5 May 1988

I feel like I’m losing my mind trying to keep track of everything. My brain is an empty void which just can’t hold anything. And you know me, Miss Worry Wart of 1988. Moving along, though, today in gym Jen and I won one of the 880 races, not only because she’s fast, but because I really booked it. Everybody says they never saw me go that fast. I never even thought about it much. Maybe I’m a good sprinter!

25 March 1989

As strange as it sounds, I sometimes feel like I’m (and I quote Jennifer Saunders) teetering on the edge of mental oblivion. It’s not just that I can feel as if I’m going mad, at times, but I’m worried that all the depression I experience now will somehow build up, and make me crazy. What if I end up killing myself one day? I don’t want to; but there are times when I’m so “black” I can’t be cheered by anything. God! Is this normal? Is this just adolescence? If I was to be suffering from anything, it’s not manic depressiveness, or else I’d like never leave my room. Sometimes I feel myself cracking when I’m alone. For instance, I’ll “live out” scenes from how I pray my future will be. It’s the only way I can cope with life at times, but is it okay? Oh, yes, I want to scream and kick and cry and dance in the moonlight…as Pink Floyd says, I feel like I’m “waiting for the worms.” And why not? I mean, I have a lot to be depressed at, so why shouldn’t I build a wall to be in perfect isolation behind? But I WANT reality. I want London and writing and true love…

God, what am I talking about? I should think I was making myself insane. What I have is depression, simple as that. Or is it more? Please don’t laugh. It’s like playing a piano out of tune, all of this is. I really do need someone, because all of this didn’t just pop up now. Look at all my diaries. I’ve always been depressed. Now I need the help.

21 April 1990

I’m angry at Kris because she had fits at me for taking a shower when I could be answering the pounding door of her majesty. I hate that everybody hates me for being me and not them. I hate my whole family and my friends and Bob and Todd and I hate everyone who lies behind each other’s backs.

I should stop here, but I’m not going to, because I must tell you about yesterday. I went with Drama Club to Philly Zoo, and then the Riverfront Dinner Theatre. I had a wonderful time. I loathe most zoos, but being there on my own with Michelle, Michelle, and Missy especially, it was fun. The food was good and the show was brilliant—“Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Shine Up?” I guess I enjoyed it because I’m Catholic. The best part was when Michelle (F) and I twice escaped the madding crowd by walking out to the pier-like porch (it was big) that surrounded the restaurant. …we discovered the wave god and made sacrifices to his power. Mystical, magical things actually happened. We kicked our shoes off and stood in the freezing wind and stared at the night…it was a beautiful experience. The water was black and cold and a great expanse of ribbon about us. The bridge over it was lit in blue against the cloudy night sky. We walked, bonded, became one in the decimated night. Nothing better.

16 March 1991

This is a classic case of falling into a pit of black head-on with no landing gear waiting for me. Of course I don’t know if I’ll ever hit the bottom or not. I wish I would. I’m sick of falling. I just wish I’d smash against the land of nails beneath my descent. Crash. Smash. Bleed ‘n burn, baby, it’s the end.

2 March 1992

At one point, amidst the shallow comfort of the hours, I have made an indirect resolution to die. I am dying now, as I write this. Slowly, as my medication drains from my blood, furiously trying to cling to my system in order to keep me alive, I begin to fall, to feel myself approach closedown. I am ready to sleep.

Whether or not I die now is up to destiny, and God. I have stopped taking my Inderol, and I will do no more. If I die, good; if I live, then that’s how it will be. There’s no point to me hanging around here anymore, though. I really have no friends left; the silly, pointless pursuit of D. that I have is hopeless (and every chance I have to possibly just see him manages to fail); I have never felt love and will never feel love; and there’s nothing in the future to look forward to, because there’s absolutely no hope of me succeeding in anything. I think I’m just taking up an uncomfortable space in everyone’s lives, and it would be better if I just exeunt quietly. I feel nothing about anything, and oh God … I am so damn scared. I don’t even think I can attempt to fight this overwhelming, stifling, sour fear anymore, because there’s no reason to win. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m frightened of dying, death, living. Living scares me more than absolutely everything else.

Last night I slashed up my right wrist with my razor blade. The sight of those veins sickened me; always has. I wanted to scar them to show them that I am on the verge of defeating the very life that pumps through their fingers.

Please…let this happen…

28 March 1993

Around 3am (right after I went to bed), I got another long-distance call, from some guy who mumbled that he wanted to know my bra size. I said, “No, sorry,” and hung up on him, leaving the phone off the hook the rest of the night. Yet another party prank to add to Marybeth’s and my growing list. I was really disturbed last night, since Missy told me about the ghost of a suicide that’s been haunting Madonna Hall lately. It scared me into turning on all the lights and locking my door. I was convinced that my poster of James Dean was watching me (his eyes do appear to move), and then I got the bra phone call, which sounded like James Dean’s voice. Great, I thought. James Dean’s calling me from the grave to find out my bra size.

1 April 1994

…it meant squeezing 6 people in Joel’s awesomely decrepit car. … We went to Moonshine to walk around the graves (Missy and Becky Miller were particularly disturbed by it), to a church playground off Rt. 72, to the A-C Elementary school playground, sort of cruised the loop, and went on a reign of destruction, putting construction cones on Mr. Campbell and Kristy H’s cars, stealing reflectors off the roadside, stealing “road closed” signs, etc. We were being very loud and obnoxious, yee-hawing everytime we passed the Frog Hallow Tavern, screaming at people we passed, veering all over the road and parking lots, and having odd sing-alongs.

18 February 1995

On Friday I did my college errands and then came back here to write my Moderns essay. Annida’s brother came for an overnight visit, and I hung with the two of them and Silvia in the music room before dinner. Afterwards, Annida, Panos, and I went to Surrey Quays. … We stayed in Annida’s room for awhile and decided to go to the Duke. Silvia and Jorge, back from his first official date with Lucy, joined us. Didn’t do much there. They drank orange juice and played a video game; I sat at our table and immersed myself in my mags. Panos clamored to go to Greenwich, and everyone was for it but me and Annida. They talked us into it. We went to Greenwich in the bitter cold (this was around 11:15 p.m. or so), singing songs the whole way. We got chips at our favourite place and ate them along the river, taking photos of each other. There was a drunken Scotsman playing guitar and singing near us, with some other drunk Brits, and Jorge went to talk to them, to our unease. They were really nice and invited us to join them. So we sat with them until 1 a.m., singing many different songs, with strangers drifting in and out of our little crowd. I felt so peaceful and happy, especially when they played “Wish You Were Here.” Then my feet started hurting, because my sneakers have holes in them, and I couldn’t feel them anymore, so I suggested we leave.

12 March 1996

I feel uncertain, as if I’m standing on a shaky precipice, not sure if I’m plummeting or on solid ground. I’m stuck in a weird kind of downward spiral. On one hand, I’m getting sick, and that’s starting to weigh me down. Since yesterday morning, I’ve had intermittent headaches and sore throats, and now I’m starting to feel nauseous, too. On the other hand, grey wisps of depression are starting to flutter about me, like a dirty mist. That began yesterday morning, too. Actually, it started Sunday night. Not only do I have no reason for this to hit me, but it’s also hard to endure, because my Zoloft has succeeded in keeping my depression at bay for a while now, and I’m not used to the helplessness of it. I had forgotten how frustrating it is, how evil, how draining. I was even feeling disconnected from the depression agonies of the people on my mailing lists, as if I couldn’t relate to that darkness anymore. Now I can, and this depression isn’t even that bad. It’s more of a heavy melancholy. It’s making me feel physically more ill, and I’m getting more short-tempered at my surroundings, which makes the depression worse. I’m frazzled at my workload, my noisy neighbor, whose TV is blaring right now, as always, my stifling schedule, having to eat the same food in the cafeteria, always surrounded by the same people and places. I need to get the hell out of here. Everything affects everything else, until I’m trapped in another vicious cycle of negative emotions…that downward spiral.

5 August 1997

It’s always there, a dark, menacing specter that I can’t shake. It trails me, it is my shadow. Although my head is finally above its surface, I feel as though it continues to affect everything I do, every move I make. I live by these strange, restrictive rules about how much I can do and how much I can handle before the threat of Depression becomes imminent, manifesting itself in the form of feeling overwhelmed. That’s what I Fear most of all…feeling overwhelmed by my life and tasks, because that usually leads to hopelessness and helplessness, which brings about the Depression that darkens my whole being. So I live carefully, cautiously, as if I have a sixth sense that enables me to sniff approaching Depressions.

12 March 1998

Ironically, the news of his illness is falling at the same time I’m starting to smell the crackling ozone of depression lightning. I don’t know if it will amount to a storm or not, but it worries the hell out of me. Jeff’s illness should remind me of how valuable life is, and how lucky I am, but all I can dwell on is the fine mist of gray that is starting to coat my world.

12 August 1999

Dinner was good, and from there we went into Adams Morgan where parking was of course impossible and the streets were jammed with bodies. The heat was incredibly intense. I wore my long, black, filmy skirt from England because my eczema made me look like a monster, and the skirt felt disgusting sticking to my skin. Beyond that, though, I was happy to be with everybody and wanted to go to Adams Morgan. The first place we went to was horrible. Scott said that it normally isn’t that jammed. It reminded Dave and me of a Scranton party, but worse, because people were packed in like sardines and the heat caused fat rivulets of sweat to pour from us. My entire body burned from my sweat, because apart from the horrendous flare up within a flare up on my legs, I also had patches of eczema on my arms and armpits. I felt like I couldn’t breathe in there. We had to migrate upstairs because there was absolutely no way to move or talk downstairs, and the upstairs kind of freaked me out. It was filled with long, sagging, dirty couches full of people. No torn leather seats to be found, but the gross fabric of the sofas made me uneasy. Dave and I both refused to sit down on them. He said he couldn’t breathe, either, so we downed our drinks (mine was water!) and went for a walk through a nearby ghetto. By the time we got back to the bar, everyone was waiting for us outside. Next stop was a pool hall that was deliciously air conditioned, but so crowded, we wouldn’t have been able to snare a table for over an hour. We left again (me with my skirt sticking into my underwear after I went to the bathroom—thank god I caught it in time!) and went to a coffeehouse place nearby. That, too, was jammed. We were just about to give up and call it a night when Dave and I decided to stop into Angles (he’s been sort of obsessed with it ever since we took him on New Year’s night). Surprisingly, it wasn’t crowded, and it was nice and cool. We got a table in the back and the guys played several rounds of pool. Somebody told Scott that sitting on a torn leather seat means that your family will die (I hope they didn’t attribute that to me or I’d be horrified! I may be afraid of torn leather seats, but when I told Dave kiddingly at New Year’s that his family was going to die because he sat on a torn leather seat, I swear I was only joking!) Scott pointed to a torn leather seat and said in a deadpan way, “There’s another family-killer over there.” Later he sat on it and exclaimed, “Whoops! I just killed my family again!” I think I got home around 2am on Sunday morning.

1 December 2000

Part of me wants to call Dr. Kaufman and ask her to increase my meds. But you can’t drive a barb of heartbreak out of your body by sedating it with antidepressants. And I’m already struggling with the side effects that plague me from the mere 20mg I take each day. However, I just think that if my meds are increased, my chances of descending into depression as I struggle to get over him will decrease. My ceaseless thinking about him and obsessive over-analysis of everything will decrease, too. Isn’t that a good thing?

In the end, he’s just a guy. Just [one] single guy. He has no right to determine my moods or my self-esteem. And maybe he’s not even the one I love…maybe he’s just a mask I stapled onto my desire to have somebody. Maybe I was just craving somebody so badly, and nobody came along for me to pine over and strive for, and then there was F., and I just shifted all those unresolved emotions his way, but it’s not him I want, per se…it’s just the idea of having somebody…

Right now, all I want is to have my mood stabilized. I hate this feeling of losing control. Sometimes, no matter how upset I am over him, I’m basically okay with the whole thing, like now. I just feel removed, numb. In that numbness lies strength and determination to get over him and focus on myself. Fine, great. That’s how it should be. But that’s not always how it is. Sometimes, no matter how hard I try to maintain that removed, strong nature of mine, I’m a fucking mess over him.

… no matter how much I’m telling myself today that it’s okay to want to break down and mourn him and even want to slash my wrists, I just can’t do it. I guess that’s human nature, for the most part—you fluctuate in how strong and how weak your willpower can be. But being like that is messy and unreliable and it reminds me too much of my utter lack of control over my moods and emotions during the years my depression remained untreated—another reason why upping my dosage is starting to look pretty damn good.



song heard most recently before posting:
Where Is Home?—Bloc Party