56. THERAPY LIES

From the Archives

(March 2005) I asked my friend Tree if therapy was clarifying things for her and she said something along the lines of “well it probably would if I didn’t lie to my therapist.” I had to laugh because I wiggled around the truth with my therapist all the time back when I had one.

Usually I was honest in a less than straightforward way. For example, she asked if I felt suicidal after Mud and I broke up and I said “now you need to understand that I grew up with a mother who was involuntarily committed every time she articulated a suicidal thought so, if I were feeling suicidal, believe me, I would never tell you. In fact, if I wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t tell ANYone who might try to stop me; I’d just do it. That being said, I haven’t purchased the bullets or anything.”

Loawd, she must have loved me.

I also don’t own a motorcycle even though I love riding them because I recognize that someone who drives like me should never operate anything on two wheels.

I was thinking about suicide on the way home tonight—probably because a coworker’s teenage son is out of control emotionally and his behavior reminds me of me as a teenager, back in the days when someone would say “hey, look at these pills I took from my mother’s medicine cabinet. Do you want any of them?” and I would say “cool” and swallow all of them.

Anything to escape reality, I reckon.

That was such a bleak, bleak period of my life. I was maybe 16 when I sat in my first tiny apartment for a good 15 minutes with a gun in my mouth, biting on that nasty metal taste and trying to convince myself to pull the trigger.

What a day that was.

I had moved out of my parents’ house and lived in a horrible smelly cheap crummy apartment that had roaches and the place was falling down around me. My entire apartment consisted of a bedroom that was barely big enough to hold a mattress, a galley kitchen, and a tiny rotting bathroom. Everything was cheap dark-brown fake wood paneling and it was all buckling and curling away from the wall—which at least made the stuff look interesting—and the place had a serious mold problem. It was also dark and incredibly depressing.

The place was rock-bottom cheap, yet I was always out of money and resigning myself to the fact that I would probably have to return to my parents’ house or quit school so I could work full time.

I really didn’t want to do either but had no other good options at the time and, well, wasn't willing to be a drug dealer or hooker.

Then, for some reason, I decided that I couldn’t shoot myself because my mother had already done that, so shooting myself meant that I would die redundant.

Somehow, this thought amused me and then I didn’t want to kill myself anymore.