dispatches from crazyville

I sat in a desk in the back of the classroom next to the door. I sat in the same spot in every class. Just in case. Ms. Z, my religion teacher, was telling us that we needed to make a mobile for the next nine weeks, one ornament/image thing to symbolize each week. The girl next to me tapped my arm and asked me a question. I stared back at her. The girl looked at me expectantly, then turned and repeated her question to the girl in front of her. I didn’t talk in school that year because I had vowed not to make friends in high school. After four years they would be gone. I couldn’t risk emotional investment. The pros couldn’t possibly outweigh the cons. What would I make for this stupid project? Knives was all I could think. Knives. I hated everybody.

I’d been friends with M, this girl down the street, since I was six, most of my life, and suddenly, she got this loser boyfriend and dropped me. I would ask her to go places and she would be like, “I’m waiting for C to call.” I was jealous and couldn’t explain why. I was crushed because she wouldn’t spend time with me. I was in love with her but didn’t recognize that in myself. I couldn’t be gay. I mean, I didn’t know any gay people, and gay people felt weird inside. I didn’t feel weird inside. Of course, I wished the boys I dated were more like my friends who were girls, and I once asked M to make out with me. (She refused.) Still didn’t register with me that I might be gay. She could have dug my heart out of my chest with a spoon and it would have felt soothing compared to how I felt about being cut off from her. I couldn’t talk about it with anyone because I knew everyone would dismiss me as an angsty teen. (Which I was. Notebooksfull of angsty poetry to prove it.) Plus, if I talked to someone, I might like them, then they would eventually betray me and I would have this pain all over again. Cutting myself, oddly, relieved that pain.

The second situation was that I had attended a K-8 grammar school from kindergarten through 8th grade. Graduating was hard because that place was a second home. I fit in there. But I didn’t want to admit that I was sad, because to be sad about that was to be weak. I guarded that secret, crying every night in bed. What kind of lame kid was I who was that attached to school?

Then there was religion class. I hated religion. I was convinced religion teachers in Catholic schools were all Satan’s minions, working to turn people away from the church. It worked on me. The hypocrisy infuriated me. Here are the rules of the Bible. Here are the rules of the Pope. Except, you don’t have to follow the archaic ones you don’t believe in. Like, use birth control if you want to. Get divorced if you need to. But for Christ’s sake, don’t be gay. And too bad if you’re a woman. When it finally occurred to me that god might just be made up, I was utterly resentful that all these people I trusted had told me god was absolute, that the rules of Catholicism were The Rules. It was an elaborate lie. I had to take religion all four years of high school and sit through classes based on a socially acceptable psychosis? And now I had to make a goddamned mobile? Jesus fucking Christ.

What else had they lied to me about? Oh my god. I felt like I was dangling from nothing, like there was no place to stand. I couldn’t trust anyone. Not even myself. What if everything I “knew” was a lie?

I stopped sleeping for awhile because I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. I stayed up late to watch Silk Stalkings, a show that was like Baywatch meets Law & Order. It was vapid, but my dad and I watched it every night. It was a way to connect with my dad without having to talk. I didn’t want morning to come. I didn’t want to wake up and go to school. Everyone there thought I was a freak because I never talked or changed my facial expression, and I wasn’t rich like the other girls, and I didn’t care about who was fucking whom, or purses, or make up, or hating my parents, or curfews, or drinking. When my dad would come into my bedroom in the morning to wake me, I would kick him or swing at him. After a few weeks of that, he got me an alarm clock.

Not sleeping didn’t make things any easier.

Then, I decided that I should get a boyfriend. So I talked enough to get one. I wore make up and short shorts. I wrote a dirty letter. He was a gross little boy who I wished was M. The dirty letter was found by my parents who then lost all respect for and trust in me. They wouldn’t let me out of the house. That was the end. I had no human connections. I bought a pair of 10-eye Doc Marten’s and started taking four and five hour long walks by myself. I always stopped by the lake at some point in the walk. There was an overpass I would sit under and let the thunder of the cars above me vibrate in my chest. The boots bit through my heels. My socks would be bloody when I took them off.

Finally, my parents took me to a psychologist. She was an ex-nun who wore appliqued sweaters, thick pantyhose, and a grim look. She sat with her feet propped on a footstool. I stared at her ’70s thin-strapped, chunkheeled sandals through three sessions. I guess my parents were worried about me, but what they told me was that they were having my IQ tested. I was scared. I knew they thought something was wrong with me, that I was crazy.

I took the IQ test at a psychiatric hospital. The short wrinkley woman who administered the test left me with this pearl of wisdom: It’s hard being a teenager.

This is a summary of what the psychologist told me: You’re smart. Top 2% of the population. You are creative. You use your intelligence and creativity to manipulate people. You’re power-seeking, attention-seeking, indirect, and passive aggressive.

Then she was like, “Do you think you need to come back?”

No, thank you. Asshole.

Initially, I was livid. Slowly, I decided she was right. I was all those terrible things. I was smart, but I used my powers for evil. I didn’t deserve to feel good. My parents didn’t trust me, they thought I was crazy enough to take me to a psychologist, the psychologist diagnosed me a jerk, my friend liked a dumbass dropout druggie better than she liked me, everyone was a hypocrite, there was no god, my whole life was a lie.

What was the point of being alive? I had never asked to be born in the first place.

I decorated my skin.