Me at 15 years old.
My dad moved into a new apartment. I decided to go to a different high school than Vanna. I thought it would help me refocus my energy on my studies. It didn't.
I was smoking pot almost every day freshman year. My dad either turned a blind eye to it or joined me. I was constantly cutting myself and abusing benzos, especially Xanax. I also started drinking at parties.
One night while hanging out with Vanna and another friend, I took at least 7 mg of Xanax. The dose prescribed to my dad was 0.5, and the maximum daily dose for anyone is supposed to be 4 mg. I have very little memory of the night, and I woke up with a lip piercing, which I barely remembered giving myself with a safety pin. I kept the piercing for several months.
Unsuprisingly, I continued to do very poorly in school. I eventually decided that I would be lucky to get my EMT-B at a community college. I didn't have any aspirations beyond that because I didn't believe I could achieve any more than that.
I had flings with several random guys, many of them quite a bit older than me, and never while I was sober.
Vanna was starting to get concerned about me, but she was still right by side doing the same things.
I celebrated my 16th birthday by getting drunk with Vanna, her boyfriend, and another guy at his house. I had about 1/4 of a handle of vodka and completely blacked out, vomited on the guy's bed, and the 3 of us got kicked out onto the street in below zero temperatures. I don't remember any of that, but I do remember waking up in my apartment's stairwell. It's a miracle we made it there. Somehow I looked back at nights like this with some sort of wishful reminiscence.
My dad finally started getting concerned about my behavior. I was constantly intoxicated, and rarely came home on weekends. My grades were the worst they'd ever been. He's always been a person who expresses any and all of his emotions with anger, which only made the situation worse. It was constant anger at home.
When my dad found a large blood stain on my carpet and bloody x-acto blades in my room, he confronted me. It was really hard to hide the hundreds of cuts and scars on my legs when he started catching on. He cried and it broke my heart. I let him take me to the ER. The sweetest nurse cleaned up my wounds and affectionately expressed her hopes that I would stop. They did a psych eval and I of course tested positive for weed and benzos. They put me on a mental health hold and I spent a night in the ER and they shipped me to a nuthouse the next morning by ambulance.
I don't remember much about the nuthouse but I know it really pissed me off. There were a few nice nurses and techs but most of them were assholes. I don't blame them. We had to wear scrubs for the first few days until we "leveled up" by being good little boys and girls. We always had to walk in a single file line and we weren't allowed to touch each other. There were bars on all of the windows and they searched our rooms all the time. I saw a psychiatrist a few times while I was there. She was a fucking bitch. She told me I had borderline personality disorder, that I would eventually abandon every single person I would ever become attached to, and would up end up very very very alone in the world. Yeah, that helped. They made me fill out a 100 + page packet that hurt my hands and didn't accomplish anything, diagnosed me with depression and put me on Lexapro. I stayed for a week and they discharged me.
After I was discharged things felt even more messed up. I came back to school the week before finals, and the school had no mercy for me. They expected me to complete all of my missed work and take finals as normal. I dug my own grave with my poor grades, but they buried me. I earned a 1.73 GPA freshman year. I was trying to stop my bad habits but I started smoking pot, cutting, drinking, and taking pills soon after I got out.
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