It's been a long time coming.

Okay... I've been waiting to write this post for a long time, and now I think I've got it done. But let me warn you: this post delves deeply into my history and my personal life. I'm okay with most people knowing these things about me, even though I haven't been able to bring myself to tell anyone other than one friend back home. But I think that there are some people who read this blog who don't want to know the things that I am going to reveal. My parents don't know. My sister doesn't know. I'm not sure I want them to. But the parents don't read this blog, and my sister... well, she could tell them if she wanted to... tho I'd prefer she didn't. Eventually I'll tell them, probably in a year or so, once Katie is done with her first year of college and they won't be so worried about her anymore, based on what litte they know of my first year's experience. In any case...


Read the rest of this post, at your own risk.



Also, before I continue, there's one thing that you need to know: Yes, this is a true story, but no, I do not feel this way anymore. I have come a LONG, LONG way since this part of my life, and I do NOT intend to ever go back to the old habits. I don't want you to worry about me. I know now what to watch for, and if I see these things happening to me again, I will get help. Promise.

I can explain my attachment to Bemidji in this way: this is the safe place where I came to heal after the year I spend in Hell. I hate saying it like that; I get all super-dramatic and harp on the one year I spent in New Mexico without ever getting to the point. I treat it as a defining year in my life when I truly wonder if it should be that way. I was 18; you'd think that all the things that make me the way I am would have already happened. But... no. I have changed more in the past three years than I ever thought possible. And it's still happening. I'm still in transition. I'm still not fully healed. The point that I spend so much time skipping around is this: a year and a half ago, in late February/early March, the year I was in New Mexico, I came within days, if not hours, of trying to kill myself. Yeah. I was that fucked up. More interesting than that is the one event that saved me.

It was late February/early March. Back during winter break, the day before I came back to New Mexico, I'd broken down and told my mom that I was failing classes and falling deeper and deeper into depression. By the middle of spring semester, things had only gotten worse. I started having problems sleeping, and staying asleep. I would lay in bed most nights and watch my digital clock change from midnight to 1 to 2 to 3 to 4... Most of the time I wouldn't even fall asleep until after dawn. I didn't go to classes because I couldn't drag myself out of bed. I rarely left my room for weeks at a time. The only class that I never missed was College Writing, because that was the one thing that kept me hoping that maybe I hadn't ruined my entire life. (Yes, I thought that I had completely destroyed my life by the age of 18; I believed that I would fail out of college and end up waitressing for the rest of my life. The fact that I could still write kept me believing that maybe somehow I could make something out of myself. I couldn't write creatively, no poetry or stories, but my research papers were things of beauty.) I didn't take care of myself. I laid in bed for most of the day wishing I could sleep. I rarely turned the lights on. I would only go out after dark, to walk aimlessly around campus three or four times (small place) when all the sane people were asleep. I resorted to cutting myself, small, slices on the backs of my hands and fingers (no, I don't do that anymore, and most of the scars are gone, but there's a few small ones I could show you if you really really want to see). It didn't make the pain go away; it only brought it to the surface, made it physical so I could deal with it. You can put band-aids on cuts. It's not so easy when it's your soul that bleeds.

It was Friday night, and I was on the phone with my mother. By that time, I was calling her every night because I had no other support system. I hadn't slept more than a few hours for the entire week. I was at the end of my rope. My mother had been trying to get me to go and see a counselor for the past month or so, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. On this particular day, tho, I was a mess. I was crying on the phone and I told my mother that I wanted to "disappear", but we both knew what this really meant. I tried weakly to say that I wasn't really planning on doing away with myself, but I'm pretty sure she didn't believe it. In any case, she was exhausted and had to get off the phone, but she swore that she'd call the next day and made me promise I'd be there to answer. I did, and she hung up. It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. I laid in bed the entire night in the dark, sobbing uncontrollably, until I fell asleep around dawn.

The next day I woke up at around noon. I felt just slightly better, enough to sit up and wonder why my mother hadn't called yet, since she was a morning person and she was really worried about me. I waited until probably 1 in the afternoon, then I decided that I'd call and shee why she hadn't called me yet. My sister answered the phone. I asked her where mom was. She got all quiet, and then asked me if they'd called me yet. I said no. I asked where my parents were again. Katie didn't want to tell me, but I persisted.

She finally told me that last night, during the time I'd spend sobbing on the phone with my mother, my cousin (who had been suffering from manic-depression, among other things) had hanged himself, leaving behind two kids and his wife. My mother had gone to be with her sister, my aunt.

That one event changed me. I realized at that moment that there was simply no way that I could cause that much pain to my family. I loved them too much to do that. It gave me the resolve I needed to finish what I had to in New Mexico and then find some way to fix myself.

My problems didn't just magically go away. I still couldn't sleep. I still had very few friends, and no one I could turn to if I needed real emotional support. I was still failing one class, and doing poorly in all the rest except College Writing. And I was still cutting myself occasionally. But very slowly, these things started to go away. The first thing that needed to be fixed was my insomnia. After a week or two it began to get easier to sleep. After that, I started going to class more often, because I was awake enough to go. I spent more time with the few friends I had, even though I couldn't talk to them about serious subjects. We watched movies together or went to the all-night diner in town. I felt better. I managed to finish my first year with a GPA just above the limit I needed to be accepted to Bemidji State.

I am proud of myself for one thing: I didn't turn to alcohol or drugs to drive my pain away. And believe me, the opportunity was there, and my family history would have supported such a tendency. Alcoholism and depression run in my family, and usually coexist in people. So it's something I have to be on guard for.

I got better when I returned to Minnesota. The first summer back was pretty rough, still, and that's why I didn't get a job. I was just barely back from total breakdown, and I didn't want to risk breaking the fragile shell I was able to put back together around myself. I stayed at home a lot, but my parents were there, so I wasn't alone. I don't really remember what I did that summer, other than that my sister and I drove to North Dakota for a week. My memory for events and times in my life is usually very good, so it's strange that I don't remember much... but maybe it's best that way.

When I came to Bemidji last year, I was terrified. I still had memories of failing out and being alone in New Mexico fresh in my mind, and I was sure that the same thing would happen to me again, and absolutely positive that, if it did, I would probably fall right back into that dark hole of depression and possibly never be able to climb back out. But by the grace of God or whatever higher power exists, that never happened. For one thing, Erin was here, and I will be forever grateful to her. She introduced me to her friends. I joined the Sci-Fi club. I met more people. I really got to know Grubbs second semester, and I got much closer to a lot of people here. I passed all my classes and managed to finish last year with a 3.34 GPA (which isn't half bad, considering that in New Mexico I ended up with something like a 1.88 GPA after my first year).

I'm not 100% better yet, nor do I believe I ever will be. I still carry a lot of baggage around with me. But I'm getting closer. I'm learning how to be a social creature. I've never been good at making friends, but now I have people I can talk to here, and that is the one thing that helps more than anything else. There are some things that I've still got problems with; my self-esteem tends to be very low, and I'm very clingy sometimes, especially when I feel vulnerable or lonely. I'm still somewhat insecure, but not anything like what I was.

And there are also habits that I have picked up in order to keep myself from ever falling back into such a trap again. I realized that the fact that I wasn't getting enough sleep was at least in part what was messing with my head so much. So now, especially if I haven't been able to get a lot of sleep recently, I am not above skipping a morning class in order to catch up a bit. But I will not skip very often, because that is yet another problem that I seemed to have. I tend to keep my room door open a lot now, and to spend a good deal of my time in public spaces, so I don't end up feeling isolated. I try and get out into the sun and fresh air every day, if only for a few minutes, because it makes me feel better. I walk a lot to help me clear my head. I make sure to take care of myself. I am honestly still timid about going up to people, even people I know, and trying to make conversation, but more and more often now I manage to do it anyway because I know that 1) people actually DO like me (it took me quite a while to realize that my friends really ARE my friends), and 2) I need to talk to people in order to be happy. I'm an introvert, but not unsocial. Just quiet. I like to listen.

So why am I writing all this, and why do I want to put it out there for the whole world to see? Because telling the story helps me to heal more. I'm reaching a point where I feel the need to be open about my past because now I'm at a place where I can deal with it. I have the support I need to look at all these emotions that I have tried to suppress, to let them out, and to know that I won't be rejected for it. I don't feel like I need to hide anymore. Admittedly, I feel like I'm somewhat behind on the scale of growing up and becoming mature. I'm dealing with issues that I rightly should have handled by the time I was 16 or so. But this is where I am, and there's nothing I can do but continue from this point.

So there it is. The subject I've been dancing around in conversation and on my blog since I started here. Um... if anyone wants to know anything more, I'm willing to talk about it, either here or in person or whatever. I've been wanting to write a post like this for months now, but I've just been waiting until I had the right words. And now that it's done, I'm happy with it. I worry about the consequences, sure, but I am better for writing all of this down. So make of it what you will.