Nowhere but Up (8 page)

Still, Jeremy flipping out wasn’t something out of the ordinary. Neither was the long-winded tirade of insults he threw at me. And I knew at some point, he’d calm down. I’d say I was sorry a million times, he’d throw in a few more digs, and we’d eventually kiss and make up (only to do a repeat a few weeks later).

But this time things escalated to an all-time high. Jeremy lashed out with a threat to expose my darkest secrets—things I’d shared with him a few weeks earlier in a moment of vulnerability. I’d been certain that sharing the deepest parts of myself would bond us together. Never in a million years did I expect to have that confidence betrayed. But that was exactly what was happening.

In hindsight, I can see that everything Jeremy said came from a place of deep hurt. I had betrayed him, and he could not see further than a momentary reaction. His words were birthed from pure rage and irrationality, a destructive place both of us knew all too well.

I know all of that now. But in that moment all I could hear was a threat that cut to the deepest part of my core.

All I felt was darkness. Pure, utter darkness.

The phone dropped from my hand almost in slow motion and landed with a thud. Life as I knew it stopped. The world turned black. I couldn’t breathe.

My hands started shaking in a fit of their own, and all I could hear was the gasps coming from my throat as I struggled for oxygen. As his words echoed in my head, a wave of shame drowned my logic, and in that moment all I could think was,
I have to die
. And it had to happen now.

In a matter of minutes, I closed the gap between wanting to die and trying to die. My brain was littered with a frenzy of next steps. I couldn’t shoot myself because I couldn’t get a gun in Canada. I wasn’t sure how many and what kind of pills to take to get the job done. I was afraid of cutting my wrists because it’d take too long for me to bleed out. As I continued to eliminate suicide options to find the best one, I thought of my sister and how she was killed.

Bingo.

I walked outside the house and waited for the perfect opportunity. It had to be a truck. A big one. I didn’t want to allow for any miscalculations. I’d time my death perfectly, I thought. I watched as cars whizzed by on my street. Chevy Impala? Too small. Ford Escort? Even smaller. Minivan? Getting there. Then I caught a glimpse of an oncoming box truck. Perfect.

Adrenaline pumped in my veins like a percussion solo. As the truck got closer, I hightailed it toward the street, running across our square front lawn and the cracked sidewalk where I used to play hopscotch. A few strides farther, and I catapulted off the curb directly into the truck’s path. Midair, I could make out the face of the driver, who was turning white as a ghost.

I closed my eyes and expected to be pummeled to the ground by the moving weight of this massive vehicle. But nothing happened. The driver slammed on his brakes and adeptly maneuvered the skidding truck onto a side street right in front of my house. He missed. He was probably thanking God in that moment. I was cursing Him.

The screeching brakes pierced my ears. I was alive, with skinned knees and a few bruises to boot. I felt devastated and humiliated that I couldn’t even end my own life. I saw the truck driver run toward me, sweat pouring down the sides of his face. Poor guy. I had given him the scare of his life.

“Are you all right?” he panted, out of breath and showing genuine concern.

I was speechless. Numb. I merely nodded in a dumbfounded haze and turned toward my house. My eyes were met by a fuming neighbor who had watched me attempt to kill myself. Even from a few yards away, I could see her glare at me as if I had just killed her best friend. I certainly didn’t expect what came next.

She screamed obscenities at me from her porch and then came barreling in my direction, her eyes bulging with poison. When she got an arm’s length away, she grabbed me, dragged me, and whipped me up onto my porch. As she cursed with indignation and called me terrible names, she spat with anger, “How could you do this? What were you thinking? How could you be so selfish?”

As I floated in and out of my thoughts, my neighbor continued her berating rant. Frankly, I didn’t see the point. I had condemned myself enough. In fact, I was quite the expert at calling me names and putting me down. There was no need for extra reinforcements. No need for her to gut my heart like a fish. I did a fantastic job on my own, thank you very much. What I really needed in that moment was compassion.

The sting of shame and the suffocating grip of condemnation seared my heart. As I curled up in a fetal position, drowning out the neighbor’s voice with my own thoughts, she finally threw her hands up in surrender. My stepbrother showed up on the porch, his eyes wide in shock, and my neighbor handed me off to him. Apparently, she had reached the point of hopeless frustration with me and pawned me off so Chuck could . . . what? Yell at me more?

Chuck led me inside the house and asked, “What happened? What made you do this?”

I had nothing to say. I didn’t have an answer. The living room spun out of control and my mind was far away, far from the table in the corner, the old-fashioned couches, my stepbrother’s face close to mine as he played detective to uncover the details of the last twenty minutes. He called my mom at some point. As we waited for her arrival, Chuck continued to hurl questions my way.

“Talk to me, Pattie. What got you to this point?” he asked again, determined to rouse an explanation out of my dazed stupor.

I couldn’t respond. I was frozen. Trapped. I just sat at the kitchen table, stuffing my anger inside, and numbly stared out into space. I knew my mom would be home soon. What on earth would I say to her? As I sat on the cold, hard chair, I couldn’t escape the gnawing feeling of wanting to die. It was all I could think about. The beckoning wasn’t loud or intrusive, though. It didn’t attack me with hysteria. It was hypnotic, softly whispering in my ear,
Die, Pattie. Just die.
The soothing lullaby consumed my thoughts until they became one with my spirit.

When my mom came home and sat at the table with me, her hands shaky as she tried to compose herself as much as possible, I opened up. I unleashed the truth of all I had suffered and told her about how I had been repeatedly abused for five years by those we both knew. I told her how I had agonized in shame and in secret for years. How Jeremy had threatened to tell. I told her I couldn’t handle it. And I didn’t know what to do with the pain.

I saw my mother soften a bit. And after we sat in silence for a few seconds, she made a shocking admission. “Stuff happened to me too, when I was young.” She didn’t say much after that. She didn’t need to.

I don’t think either one of us knew what to do at that point.

It was Mom who broke the silence. “I’m taking you to the hospital. We’re going to get you help.”

I am troubled

I feel empty

I don’t know what I want

Comfort, love and mostly attention

I have a wall built around my heart

I am worried

I am sad

And I’m filled with regret

Regret for not saying no

When I was little

When I was curious

And when I was hopeful

I wrote this poem on May 20, 1992, the day before I was admitted to Stratford General Hospital.

The evidence that I needed help was there all along. Silent cries. Acting out. Rebellion. All signs I was fighting for attention, for someone to stop and listen and tell me I mattered. Like so many others, I suffered in silence, unsure of how to claw my way out of the pit of despair and into light. The only way I knew how was to kill myself.

It hadn’t been the first time I’d wanted to do so. Almost two years earlier to the day, I had written in my journal, “I’m so depressed lately. I’m always crying, and I’ve thought about suicide a couple of times but I doubt I’d ever get enough stupidness to do it.” I guess I’d finally found the “stupidness.”

Nothing happens overnight. I buckled under the combined pressures of the sexual abuse, deep childhood wounds, and simply being a teenager. The latter is hard enough. When you’re a teenager, you are tangled in a web of hormonal mayhem. The roller coaster begins when puberty hits. So many things are happening. Mood swings show up. You’re trying to figure out your identity on shaky ground. You get squashed in the frustrating place between being a child and being an adult.

Add to that whatever emotional and mental issues have followed you around since you were younger. If you don’t resolve them, or at least work on digging out the roots of your problems, they just grow deeper. And you act out progressively worse as time goes on.

In this state it’s easy to fall into abusing drugs and alcohol. It’s how I numbed my pain. It also made my emotional condition worse and contributed to my severe mood swings. My highs were really high and my lows were extremely low. I was emotionally unstable, unable to find equilibrium. Being in a temperamental relationship didn’t help matters.

I didn’t protest my mom’s suggestion of going to the hospital; a part of me felt I had to go. I was just embarrassed. A cloud of shame hung over my head, ready to burst. I knew where I would stay: the psych ward. The stigma of the “crazy” floor started whispering seductively in my ear.

You’re crazy, Pattie.

Who’s going to love you now?

What kind of girl finds herself in the crazy hospital?

When my mom signed the consent forms, the self-condemnation grew louder, making it almost impossible to convince myself that I wasn’t crazy or stupid, that I was just a girl with a broken heart who needed some help. So I let go. I gave up. The last bit of faith and hope I’d clung to had been destroyed.

I was a patient for nineteen days, much longer than I would have guessed. I want to get one thing straight, though. The psych ward was nothing like it’s often portrayed in the movies. The floor wasn’t a human zoo overrun with patients soiling their pants and being chased by orderlies. I didn’t see people in zombie-like trances aimlessly walking the hallways, talking to ghosts. And I didn’t come across violent patients who needed to be contained in straitjackets to keep them from tearing up the TV room. The ward was actually quiet. And sad.

My roommate was there because she tried to kill herself by taking a bunch of pills. She seemed normal, friendly, and polite. Just like me. But if you paid enough attention to her beautiful face, you could make out a glaze over her distant eyes. I guess it’s easy to recognize the look when you see it every day in the mirror.

I didn’t think I was any different from the other patients—the depressed ones, the schizophrenics, the suicidal, the delusional. We had a bond; we were all troubled, just to different degrees and in different ways. Each of us was there to ultimately try to make sense out of our individual circumstances. Whether it was finding a reason to live or figuring out why we hated ourselves so much. Or trying to stop the voices in our head from controlling our thoughts. Or, like me, trying to get to the bottom of unmanageable and debilitating depression.

Why did I throw myself in front of a truck? Why did I keep returning to a volatile relationship that only dug me deeper into an emotional grave? Why did I think ending my life was better than living it? I had a slew of questions—some obvious, others unknown—that needed to be investigated. A big part of me was ready to dredge up the mess, to talk about my past and expose it to the light of day. But I didn’t get to do that in the hospital.

My meeting with the admitting psychiatrist was unpleasant. He seemed cold and indifferent, flying through my mental health assessment as quickly as possible. Maybe he’d had a bad day and wanted to rush home in his fancy car so he could sit in front of a warm fireplace and nurse a glass of cognac.

He fired off each question in a machine-gun succession without taking any time to unpack each one.

“In the past two weeks, how often have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless?”

“How long have you had these feelings?”

“When did these feelings begin?”

I didn’t expect the doctor to be my best friend and sit there for an hour patting my head and telling me everything was going to be okay. But I was put off that he didn’t express even an iota of genuine interest. At least pretend! Look up from your notes more than for a fleeting glance. Give me a chance to answer the questions without being interrupted. Hey, I’m sure working in a psych ward isn’t as fun as spending the day on a beach in the Caribbean. But still, a little effort goes a long way.

After an hour of asking questions, scribbling in his leather notebook, and constantly nodding like a life-size bobblehead doll, the doctor gave me some meds and left. I saw him maybe one or two more times before I was discharged.

I met with another therapist during my stay. Our meetings were pretty much more of the same. I was dying to talk about the sexual abuse in detail, not just as a passing thought when describing the symptoms of my depression. I didn’t have much luck.

It would be like that for years. In the course of my search for healing, I visited with a number of counselors and tried different forms of therapy. I think each counselor assumed I had addressed my sexual abuse with the previous therapist, so the topic would never be broached in detail. The reality was, I had never combed through that part of my past. In a way, I felt I fell through the cracks, though I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.

One therapist in particular, a sexual abuse specialist, was adamant that talking was futile. “You don’t need to talk so much, Pattie,” she told me. “Many people mistakenly believe that you have to talk about things to get better. That’s just not true.” Instead, she focused on a psychotherapy technique called EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) that is used for people with PTSD. I had to think of a traumatic memory and focus on it while I followed her finger’s movements and answered a few questions. I’m sure this therapy has helped others, but it didn’t seem like it did a whole lot for me.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally had the opportunity to bring about lasting healing by dealing with the abuse. But back at the hospital as a teenager, I felt like none of my core issues were addressed. None of my hang-ups were discussed. None of the reasons I found myself in a psych ward, specifically the aftermath of the many years I had been sexually abused, were any more than merely mentioned in passing.

I was lonely in the hospital. There wasn’t much to do outside of popping meds, watching TV, going to group therapy, and hanging out in the common area. I felt trapped, like I’d been given a prison sentence without the possibility of parole. None of the therapy seemed to be making a difference. Nothing in my mind or heart was being rewired. I was the same person with the same depressing thoughts, low self-esteem, and haunting past.

I didn’t even get many visitors. Outside of my parents and John Brown, the director of the Bunker, I don’t remember anyone stopping by. It was a sobering wake-up call that I had no real friends. Sure, I had plenty who would party with me in an instant, but when I hit rock bottom and acted out my exit plan, none of my party buddies showed up.

John, on the other hand, was determined to show me he was genuine and he really did care. He regularly visited with me. I always knew he was coming because I could smell him down the hallway. Well, not him exactly, but rather the unmistakable, mouthwatering aroma of the fast food he brought. John would walk into my room carrying greasy bags of McDonald’s and KFC, and my eyes would immediately light up. Hey, what seventeen-year-old doesn’t like junk food?

I didn’t mind John’s visits so much, even though he droned on and on about God. Though I was used to his constant God-babble from hanging out with him at the youth center, at times it grated on my nerves.
God this. God that.
As I half-listened while munching on french fries and fried chicken, I remember thinking, “This guy can’t stop talking about God, and it’s not even Sunday.” Needless to say, he still left quite an impression.

The first time John came to visit, he brought a rose and told me that God told him to tell me He loved me and saw me like that rose—beautiful. I chewed on a Big Mac and stared at the perfect flower. First of all, I thought John was nuts for telling me he heard from God. Second, I thought he was completely off his rocker when God’s message was that I was as beautiful as the flower John was holding.

Somehow I was able to get past the whole hearing-from-God bit. But I just couldn’t escape the comparison to the rose.
Oh my gosh
,
there is no way I’m like that rose. I’m not beautiful. I’m not good. What planet is this guy on?
John continued to visit me and to share God’s love for me in a caring way, but the more he talked, the more I thought he had gone bonkers. What did he know about God’s love for me? Obviously not much.

One day he said something that struck me, something I couldn’t even roll my eyes at in my head. “Pattie, when you hit rock bottom, you have nowhere to go but up. You don’t want to live anyway, so why don’t you just see what God can do with your life and what plans He has for you?”

With eyes of compassion John asked, “What do you have to lose?”

Though we’d had many heart-to-hearts about God, I’d never even entertained John’s passionate belief that God loved me. I’d never experienced God before, let alone the kind of love John shared with me. Frankly, at that point in my life, I didn’t know if I believed God even existed. I did, however, know pain. I knew abuse. I knew abandonment. I knew fear. I knew disappointment. I knew all the junk that led me to attempt suicide. But love? Not so much.

What do you have to lose?

The question stumped me. I had no defense. I was speechless because the truth was, John was right. I had nothing to lose. I had tried doing life my way and failed miserably.

After John left that day, his words echoed in my head. As I lay in bed, plagued by my life choices, by the path I had chosen, and by the injustices I had experienced as a child, I realized I really didn’t have a better option.

I lay in my bed, mulling over what I was about to say. I felt vulnerable. Either I was about to pray to the God of the universe, or I would be talking to the ceiling, confirming my mental state as a deranged nut. “Um, God,” I began. “If You’re real, I pray You do what John said. Help me live my life. I don’t know how to do this on my own.” A part of me wondered what God could possibly do with my life. But I saw it as the ultimate challenge. I’d see what, if anything, He could do to redeem the story I had so poorly written myself. I was willing to give it a shot.

I knew there was more I had to say. I couldn’t just stop there. John had talked to me before about how we are all sinners and how our sin separates us from God. He sent His Son, Jesus, to die for our sins so that if we accept His forgiveness, we will be reconciled to God. So I asked Jesus, “Would you forgive me of all my sins?”