I think I'm crazy.  Not like voices-in-my head crazy, not like psycho-killer crazy.  I don't think I'm Jesus and I don't think I can see the Apocalypse in my asparagus.  I'm not going to jump off a building tomorrow afternoon instead of eating lunch, but I still think I'm crazy.  Why?  I know why.  Probably a lot of people know why, because we've all done things wrong sometimes.

I met a lady on Saturday.  She talked to all of us - only my little sister missed the introductory therapy session.  Lucky her.  I didn't make eye contact with my parents the entire time we were in that office.  I wanted a wall around me.  I didn't want them to be there.  I don't like it when people know things about me.  It makes me weak inside.

The lady says I have a possible depressive disorder, but doesn't know what or how severe yet.  She said "mood disorder" too, but only once and that was before the end of the session.  I don't know what a mood disorder is.  All I know is that Cole might have one in The Sixth Sense, but he doesn't.  Everything I know about therapy I learned from Good Will Hunting.  I know lots of people with shrinks, but I don't get many play-by-plays.

It was hard to tell my mother I'd been cutting, but finally I got scared enough.  I knew I was going down again.  We'd had another big fight and I was afraid.  I thought I was going to go crazy.  When you do something and you know it's wrong and you keep doing it anyway, it makes you fear for your sanity.  I thought that whatever kept me rational might disappear.  I thought I might forget that it was bad.

Sometimes, I feel like there are two of me.  One of them is smart and she laughs.  She's a fighter and she talks back to authority, and she knows who she is.  But then there's this other girl, and she's angry and she hates things and people and herself.  She sits in the corner and rocks with her hair in her eyes, and she cuts herself in her room on weeknights during the schoolyear.  She'd rather feel pain than anything else.  She is suicide walking.  I am myself.  I am afraid of her.

When my mother told me I wasn't nuts, it was like someone pulled a huge rock off my chest.  I still cried; I was still angry.  I was still scared, but it was better.  I felt safe.  I knew someone would take care of me.  Even on my way to doctor lady's office when I sat in the car and chewed on the insides of my lips until they stung and stung, and I fantasized about blood leaking down the side of the door and soaking my pants, I felt a little safer.  I have therapy twice next week.  I'm not sure I believe her when she says I'll get better, but at least I have a net spread across the chasm of my screaming way down.

The endorphin high is a powerful thing.  It eats you up a little, just a bit, a nibble, one instant at a time.  Maybe you are angry.  Maybe you are sad.  The fact that you or I have made the decision to start putting holes in our skin implies a bigger problem than just a moment of miserable insanity.  I have a doctor now.  I have had my family therapy session.  The lady has told me what she thinks may be wrong.  We're going to start talking about it on Tuesday.  I trust her and I don't - I can't quite make myself believe it's possible to stop, not when I can bite my knuckle until it'll be pink the next morning and have it feel so good in the meantime.  But that's not going to stop me, myself, from trying.  There are two girls in my head, and I want the crazy one to go away.

Is there a moral to this story?  I don't know.  I'm seventeen, I'm a senior in high school.  I am getting help.  Maybe one of these days someone will convince me that I don't have to be crazy anymore.  I want to believe it, but I don't think I do.  I recently realized that I could tell someone, a fact that hadn't popped into my head for the previous twelve months of my life.  Depending on who you are it may or may not sound like a stupid thing to you, but it's a thing I didn't understand until about a week ago regardless.  

You can't quit on your own.  I've tried.  I didn't believe it the first time I heard it, but maybe I'm telling someone for the fifth time, or the tenth time, or whatever number, and now you're one step closer.  Going crazy by yourself, locked in a little secret closet in your head, sucks.  Tell someone, damn it.  Tell your mom, your godfather, your cousin, your cat.  Tell me.  I want to believe that I can be convinced of my own sanity, and if they can talk me into it, then maybe they can talk somebody else into it too.  At the very least, we can entertain the possibility.

September 22, 2007