Regarding the Darkness

In The Beginning

"Wait, so you're telling me that if you eat one peanut, one tiny peanut, you'd die ?!!"

I nodded. I was explaining to my third grade best friend that I had a peanut allergy, and she couldn't believe it. We were at lunch, sitting under the biggest tree on the school's property. To my child mind, this tree stood at over 100 feet tall, but in reality, it was probably more like 75 feet. My best friend, Erin, was eating a peanut butter sandwich, and I had to explain to her that peanuts could kill me.

She leapt up, dropping her sandwich on the ground, and ran over to the play structure where the other kids were playing.

"GUYS !! ELLE HAS A PEANUT ALLERGY !!" she screamed as she neared the swing set.

Almost like clockwork, the kids ran over to me and started asking questions. Most of them were innocent, but there was one comment that stuck with me all the way through college. It was from a kid I sat next to in class named Nate. Silently, he threw a Smucker's PB&J wrapper at me and began to laugh.

"I hope you die," he said before running back to the play structure. The kids that surrounded me began to chant "I hope you die" as the world began to spin.

This was a dream. I had been here many times before. 

It's not real. It's not real. This happened years ago. I'm safe. It's not real.

My strategies for waking me out of a nightmare were gradually becoming less and less effective. Now that I recognized I was dreaming, the nightmare became more intense. Faces melted into the ground and the chanting became almost demonic.

It's not real it's not real it's not real-

It took my current best friend, Amity, shaking me by the shoulders to snap me out of the hellish state my dream had become. Once I was conscious, I wiped at the tears on my face with the back of my hand and sat up.

"You were screaming again," she said with a tired voice, flipping on the light on my bedside table. This was the third time I'd had a nightmare this week. Amity had woken me up for each and every one of them. Her poor sleep schedule was probably screwed. 

"Yeah, sorry," I sighed. "It was the same one as before."

"I figured," Amity replied as she sat down on my bed. "Have you talked to your therapist about it yet ?"

I shook my head. It took everything in me to not lose my shit every time I talked to her. My therapist was a Bible-beating, God-fearing woman, and even though I had grown up with women like herself, I did not want to hear that my depression could be solved through prayer every week. Last week, I actually had almost snapped.

"So, Elle, tell me about your suicide attempt your junior year."

I looked intensely into my computer screen. Since all of my therapy sessions were now online, I was sitting on my bed with my camera on, praying time moved faster than normal so I could just be done with this session.

Sighing, I told her what I had said every time.

"In November of my junior year, my family went on a trip somewhere, I don't remember where. They left me at home because I had school and a job, and I was 16, so what was the harm ? Well, the second they left I swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol and cut myself."

My therapist nodded and scribbled some notes onto her notepad. I was convinced she only doodled or wrote about how fucked up I was, rather than actually writing notes. "And what was the outcome ?"

"Well, I puked for the whole weekend and had the worst headache of my life. I had overdosed on Friday, and on Monday, I went to school and work as if nothing had happened."

She nodded some more and then asked the million-dollar question: "Why did you do it ?"

I thought about this for a while. Of course she was going to ask that, but it wasn't exactly like I had prepared an answer. So I gave her the run-of-the-mill answer I usually gave everyone: "I didn't want to live anymore."

My therapist chuckled. "Honey, you really need Jesus."

I said nothing. I simply left the Zoom meeting and closed my laptop. I didn't care I had paid $40 for the entire 55 minute session and we still had 20 minutes to go; I just couldn't stand to be in that meeting anymore. 

Then I picked up the knife I kept in my nightstand and pressed hard against my bare leg. I didn't want to die, I just didn't want to be so numb.

Amity sighed, snapping me back to reality. "You really need to get a new therapist, Elle."

"I know," I replied. "It's just so difficult re-establishing care under a new therapist, and they're all so expensive. You know my parents won't pay for therapy."

My best friend nodded. "Well, nonetheless, I still think you should at least look into it." She leaned over and gave me a hug, then said goodnight and left. I sat silent in the pale yellow light of my lamp.

I knew I needed to get a new therapist. My current therapist was convinced all of my problems came from God, and none of my problems came from my parents who expected too much and hit me when I didn't give them everything they wanted. 

I remember once when I was 14, I was told by my gynecologist that I was infertile. I didn't produce progesterone, and unless we got that turned around, I was never going to have kids. My mother took me home, lecturing me the whole way, and then hit me when we got in the garage because I could never give her grandchildren. 

Nobody could ever understand, it seemed. 

My family and I lived in Northern Colorado. I had a younger sister and an even younger brother who was adopted, and they were my world. I would read them stories and we would go on adventures together. Other than that, my family had two dogs, and I had a fish.

My parents were the perfect parents from the outside. I was in a good school, I had good grades, they fed me and put clothes on my back, and they even took us on family vacations. But it wasn't until you got inside the relationships that you started to see the abusive tendencies crawl out from the woodworks and become blatantly obvious. 

My relationship with my mother was the most broken. Isn't it supposed to be that the mother is the one who guides the daughter through everything- through her first period, through bra shopping, through relationships with stupid boys ? My mom did all of those things, but it was through a broken lens. To her, I was the daughter she never wanted, it seemed. I was imperfect and overweight, but why would that destroy the relationship ? I would never know.

My dad, on the other hand, was quiet and reserved. If he was ever angry, he almost never showed it, and that could be considered the sole reason why my relationship with him could probably still be saved. But that isn't to say he was perfect, because he definitely hit me more than my mom did. 

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder at 8 years old, although that diagnosis got tweaked twice: first to persistent depressive disorder at 16 and then to treatment-resistant depression at 18. I also had generalized anxiety disorder (diagnosed at 13). My parents wanted to believe so badly that it was nothing but a phase, and that I was actually fine, but this wasn't the case at all. I began self-harming when I was 10 years old, in 5th grade. I wasn't even in middle school.

It took a suicide attempt and several trips to the emergency room for my parents to even begin to believe that I was sick. I was 17 when they finally caved and allowed me to go to therapy, and even then, I had to completely pay for it by myself. It's not a necessity, so you're going to pay for it on your own.

What complete and utter bullshit. 

I flipped my light off and turned back over. I had therapy the next day, so I needed to get some sleep. Maybe if I got a decent amount of sleep, I'd actually tolerate my therapist a little more.