I walk down a hallway with white walls and white tile floors. The lights are too bright. Describing it, I suppose it sounds like the scenes in movies, right when the protagonist’s brother or best friend is on the wrong side of the car, the side that got hit with the 18 wheeler. The one where he sees the light, right before he confronts his death, unless he’s Brad Pitt. God I love Brad Pitt. The irony of the situation is that my walk down the hallway did not signify the moment I fell to death, but rather the moment I came to life.
The Carrier Clinic is, by internet definition, “an American private, not-for-profit behavioral healthcare system, that specializes in psychiatric and addiction treatment.” The government says something similar of the sorts, with an appendage that references some law noting the degree to which people can be of danger to themselves and still remain in the real world. But you ask me, you ask Betsy, you ask Ashley, you ask Paula, you even ask the people that work there, any of us will tell you that the Carrier Clinic is somewhere people go because they are the personified representation of the gesture moms give to their kid with the phone shoved between their ear and shoulder and have “had it up to here.”
I slowly push down on the cereal dispenser. Bran Flakes. I think of the belgium waffle with strawberries and peanut butter I had so accustomed myself to waking up to for the past eight years of my life and shuddered. There was also the one day I stayed home from school because we ran out of chunky and my mom used smooth. I looked up, the cardboard flakes were overflowing, then to my left at a girl who looked like Dora the Explorer. Dora the Explora. Dorer the Explorer. Never made sense to me. Before I could say something to relieve the uneasing eye contact, she said “What’d you do to get here?” only except it came out like “HOLA ME LLAMO DORA! CHRIST ARE THOSE BRAN FLAKES?” I nodded. She laughed. After I recalled the last thirty seconds of dialogue, and proceeded to wonder how someone could ask such an invasive question to a complete stranger. I admitted to her my claim to overdosage, surprising even myself. She clearly had never attended cotillion, or English. “OHhhh word so u was like tryna die?” only except it came out like “FELIZ CUMPUEANOS.” “It’s not my birthday,” I said. She laughed again and walked back to her seat. I unconsciously watched the back of her head as she made her way towards a group of laughing and talking girls who welcomed her and the six bowls of cereal she brought with her knowingly. I silently wondered to myself how on Earth there could possibly be cliques in a setting like this. How long could one possibly be stuck here for? I must’ve stood their thinking for years because gosh darn it, my Bran Flakes had sogged over.
You know that feeling on the first day of school, when you walk into the cafeteria, you look around, completely unsure of where to sit? Okay, sounds good well I don’t. Didn’t, rather. I had my Bran Flakes and some type of yogurt that claimed to make you drop 2 dress sizes in 3 weeks, as long as you don’t eat and exercise for 24 and a half hours a day. I looked around, feeling sorry for myself and having the sense of the kid in the movies who gets shoved by someone significantly larger, as he gazes around the massive, 2,000 person, dual level lunchroom. Well, I was a confused white girl in a dual table closet.
If you are confused, know that I was probably just as confused if not more confused in the moment. I am also confused now. The brain suppresses traumatic experiences, presumably in attempt to avoid the stress that comes along with the recollection of certain events. So I, or my unconscious self rather, pushed and pushed the memories of my time at the Carrier Clinic to the point where I can only recall strange and notably unrelated occurrences.
The brain works, how the world works, how Voldemort works in Harry Potter. As a society we suppress the discussion of certain people or situations that evoke strong, usually uncomfortable feelings. It’s the same reason why you avoid talking about politics with your cousins from Alabama; their extensive and unforgiving gun collection speaks novels. It’s the same reason why Chatham Middle School keeps Speak behind the desk, and requires a permission slip to be signed for those who want to take it out. We fear and avoid the discussion of topics that leave us with uneasy feelings. But if Laurie Halse Anderson had not written Speak, and if I had not forged that permission slip, how was I supposed to learn that rape wasn’t just a man in an alleyway? That it was the star quarterback, that it was family members, that it was people you used to love, people that you still love?
I sat in a circle. I don’t remember the setup, but I remember how it felt. Comfortable. It felt comfortable. There were chairs of all different colors and shapes and textures and none of them matched but they all looked right, some weren’t even chairs, some were just big pillows that were probably bought at a garage sale in ‘96; I avoided those but I still knew they were comfortable. I was surrounded by girls just like me, sad and confused but grateful in a sense, to be in a certain state where it couldn’t get much worse, so it would and could only get better. Everyone was at peace, wearing sweatpants with the drawstrings taken out, uggs, tshirts, and no makeup. Everything was weird but everything felt right. The therapist that would run the group looked more anxious than those of us who were in it.
I don’t remember how the conversation got there, but I remember what it was. I remember girls crying. I remember girls that weren’t crying that should be crying. I remember hearing words that I didn’t understand, DIFUS sounded no different from dufus. I remember that Betsy told one girl that she’d be lucky if anyone ever thought she was pretty enough to rape. I remember thinking how anyone could ever say anything like that to someone. I sit here at 11:54 on a Monday night and I realize, Betsy said that because no one ever thought of her as pretty enough not to rape.
I did not understand what these girls were talking about. I was and am raised in a town where the horrid but real facts of life, mental illness and the events that cause it, are swept under the closet and kept behind closed rugs. A place where the sadness and sorrow stopped when you hit the spacebar of your MacBook to stop the Coldplay that was blaring out of your five thousand dollar Sonos all-house sound system. Which is the exact problem. People outside the strange comfort provided by the oddly lit and furnished Carrier would not be able to understand how I felt, what I felt, why I felt it. Or so I was taught and raised to believe.
My zip code is five numbers. 07928. It represents where I live, where hundreds of Christmas cards are sent to every year, and the coasters that are left untouched in my living room. But above all, my zip code represents a way of life, the only way I have ever been accustomed to. A life where, the day I got out of the hospital, my Mom told me that I could never tell anyone what I did and where I was, because she feared that our zip code represented a group of people so over consumed with success and getting ahead, that they would use what happened to me to somehow advance their own existence. A life where the first time I will ever talk about my time at 252 Co Rd 601, Belle Mead, NJ 08502 will be the last because the chemical imbalance in my head that caused my fourteen year old self to feel as if the only answer was to end my life is far too complex and strays too great a distance from the means of the Vineyard Vines Semi-Annual Friends and Family Sale to be relevant to or of appropriate discussion for the bunco table.
It is not normal to learn how to pass a drug test with nothing but a citrus fruit and the label from a pill bottle when you are fourteen. It is not normal to be exposed to usage, alcoholism, rape, abuse, and all the other terrible and frightful means of life in the eighth grade, but it is necessary. For, if I had not been in that position two years ago, I would be just another of the 9,000 people that reside in the 07928, sitting at the dinner table. My parents would ask how my day was, just as they had fifteen minutes prior, and fifteen minutes before that. The emails that flood my inbox from Change.org, addressing the “New Petition is Trending on Change!” about women in third world countries that were forced to marry their rapist, would be deleted by the masses. Because as long as I had rights and wasn’t being raped or abused or forced, what did it matter, right? Wrong.
Now I sit here a different sixteen year old, aware of what is going on outside my zipcode and outside the Short Hills Mall. I see (or try, bear with me) everyone for their true worth, not for what their clothes or cars are. I am better able understand that the Queen Bee acts like a complete and utter female dog because she is insecure and fears that the only way to avoid being victimized is by doing the victimizing. It goes beyond the means of high school.
The fear, the suppression, what if it was all gone? What if we treated mental illness just like we treat smoking or obesity? What if we put Speak in the freaking display case? What if we asked our cousins from Alabama just how there 36 Series Glock was doing? What if Harry screamed Voldemort at the top of his lungs? What if we welcomed and encouraged the discussion of people who feel like their world is going to absolutely break down, to a point in which they feel that swallowing a Super Saver Size Advil bottle is the only answer, I’m talking about the people who wake up every day praying and hoping that something good enough will happen to give them a reason to live? Maybe, just maybe, we all wouldn’t feel so alone, because depression and self harm and anxiety and panic attacks and bipolar disorder are real, all of it is real.
By ignoring it and leaving it behind closed doors, we are inherently encouraging the idea in so many people’s heads that it is just us, we are the only one suffering and hurting, which is so incredibly fallacious. But who was there to tell my 14 year old self that? Who will be there to tell every child, adult, elder, everyone that? Not a single person, but rather the conceptual idea that a zip code should not represent how openly we discuss the facts of life, that the person to your left may feel just as badly as you do, and if everyone who identified with 07928 and every other 5 number postal code in the world could wrap their narrow minded heads around that, maybe the 1 in 6 high schoolers who seriously consider suicide would instead seriously consider talking to the person to their left. Because you are not alone.