I missed my teen years when recounting my history. I mentioned it briefly, but I glided right by it because, well, to be honest with you, that was the worst decade of my life. That’s saying a lot because my whole life until my fiftes has been pretty miserable. It was my teens, though, when I actively wanted to die, had dissaciative breaks from reality, got anorexic (with a side helping of bulimia), and hated everything. I skipped to my twenties, which weren’t great–but not as bad as my teens.
Side note: When my older nephew was four or five, we were playing Uno. He was throwing a tantrum becasue he could not stand to lose. I wasn’t trying to win, mind you, but it’s hard to cheat at Uno–even in favor of someone else. I was sympathizing with him because I hate to lose as well. I try to keep it to myself, but it comes out from time to time. He was sighing and rolling his eyes, and he was acting as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. I asked him what was wrong. He said that he hated it. I asked what he hated. He sighed again and said, “Everything.” It broke my heart, but I understood becasue I felt like that all the time, too.
Back to my teens. I was deeply depressed and wished to die every day. I could not remember a moment of joy, and it was grueling just to slog through every day. I was a good student without even trying, but my parents ignored that. They just scolded me when I got anything less than an A. If my brother got a B, on the other hand, then he got praised to high heaven and given money. It wasn’t until much later that I realizedh he had a learning disability and was on the spectrum. School was not his thing, even though he was off-the-charts smart. My mother didn’t think about him being on the spectrum or having a learning disability. To her credit, though, she bought him a (then very expensive) Apple computer (I think it was an Apple? this was back in the late 70s/early 80s) because he was interested in all things electronic. That saved him, I’m convinced, and he still talks about it with fondness.
On the darker side, my father protested the purchase because it was so prohibitively exensive. He also got upset with my mother because she would not let him spank us. She did not believe in corporal punishment, and he did. He said that since he colud not spank my brother and me, he was hands off with parenting at all. Not that he did much to begin with, but he blamed my mother for not all,owing him to hit us. Which was a joke because he did not care about us at all. He wasn’t ever home, and I can’t remember him coming to any of my activities. I’ve had my issues with my mother, but I will say that she did try to parent my brother and me when we were kids. She did her best back then–I have to give her that much credit. It was only when we hit teenage years that she lost all interest.
Whin I was in high school, I was as depressed as I’ve ever been in my life. I got good grades, but that was only beacuse I was good at school. It was easy for me, but it wasn’t enjoyable. I was in an Advanced Creative Writing class with a teacher who was not appreciative of creativity at all. I have a hunch, looking back in retrospect, that it was a class she was forced to teach rather than one that she actually wanted to teach. Whenever I submitted poems I had written, she had the same critiques: I didn’t put titles on them; they didn’t rhyme; I changed tenses; I didn’t use capitalization or punctuation. I acquiesced to the first point by using the first line as the title, but the rest just chafed at my soul. Had she never heard of e.e. cummings?
One day, she was not in class for some reason and we were all running wild. I wrote suicidal poems on the blackboard (yes, it was a cry for help, and no, it was not appropriate), which another kid then erased. It hurt deep down into my soul, and I was out of that class within a month. I went to a different teacher, Beth Weaver, and asked to do an independent study with her, one that we structerd together. It was me reading novels and discussing them with her. In retrospect, it was probably her study hour and I was extremely fortunate that she was willing to help out a sad, depressed, ill-fitting freak like me. She saved my life, and I can’t thank her eneough.
I did write about my first year in college, but I did not mention the second. It was bizarre. The first semester, I started dissociating. Not on purpose, but it just happened. When I was in class, I’d be gone for most of the class, and when I came back to my senses, I had no idea where I’d been. Sometimes, it was that I had fallen asleep. Othertimes, though, it was something else. It happened while I was driving, too, which was even scarier. I’d be driving down 35W, for example, and then ‘wake up’ ten minutes later, not sure how I’d gotten where I was. I also had times when I was talking to someone and then ten minutes, I was still talking to them, but had no idea what we had been talking about. It was clear that they thought we were having a normal conversation, but I had no clue where I was or what was going on.
Obviously, I had serious mental health issues, but I had no idea that was what was happening. You have to understand that I’ve been different all my life. I never fit in, and I just accepted that I was a weirdo. I was the defective one who could never be like other kids. The dissociation–it didn’t even clock with me that it was weird. I mean, I knew there was something wrong with me, but I thought it just fell into the rubric of ‘Minna weirdness’. It wasn’t until a decade or so later that I realized it was more than that.
I was lucky that with all the things that was wrong with my brain, I didn’t actually go over the edge. I danced on that edge for avery long time, but i did not topple over into sheer madness. Or suicide. I was lucky. I was also lazy. I was lethargic. If I had an iota more energy, it might have ended much differently. This is acutally something that’s been studied. The most dangerous time for someone who is deeply depressed to commit suicide is when they get just enough enerlgy to do it.
I was a hot mess. The most of a hot mess in my late teens/early twenties. I feel a lot of tenderness for that Minna because she was fucked up and had no clue that she needed help. She was so out of her depth, she didn’t realize she was swimming hin the ocean. She just accepted that was how life was supposed to be, which was one of the reasons I did not want to live. Who the hell would want to stay alive if every moment was pure agony?
I was very lucky to escape my teens.