Wednesday, October 28, 2015 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, October 28, 2015 // The Statement
5B
I
dreaded my twelfth birthday.
I was panicked — I wasn’t ready for this. I
tried to skew the details to my advantage: really,
I’d been six and a half when she died. So double that
would be … thirteen. Whew. One more year until I
had lived half of my life without her.
I did a quick mental check, listing off the facts.
I always wanted to know more facts. I made lists,
scratching tiny numbers down the side of lined paper
(or a sticky note, or diary page), thinking that if I
knew more facts, it somehow made me know her.
1. She worked at the airport.
2. She studied math at UCLA.
3. She had a great smile.
4. She liked to remind people to not take life too
seriously (this one was my favorite).
I listed them, the facts, as if it all could be mastered
like a test, and by knowing the answers I achieved a
mastery of her entire being.
I would list off the memories, too. Going to
Blockbuster, anticipating the plunk of the hard and
dusty gumball as it rattled from the machine into my
hand. Me, soaking wet and laughing with glee as she
greeted me at the exit of a water ride at SeaWorld.
Riding my Razor Scooter on the hardwood floor when
she pretended not to know. Her smile as I handed her
a homemade Mother’s Day card crusted with pink
glitter glue. And then I would get sad, thinking that
the first three years of life don’t really count, because
who really remembers them? Maybe bits and flashes,
but nothing to put on the list. But it didn’t matter, I
needed those years to count. So they did.
WhEn my thirteenth birthday loomed, I was
terrified. It wasn’t fair, it felt like such betrayal. She
meant so much more than just half of my life. Really,
I’d been older than six and a half when it happened.
In fact, I’d been six years, seven months, and eleven
days old. Which is practically seven, right? So if I was
seven, double that would be fourteen. Whew. One
more year.
I reveled in anything that was once hers. Her thin
blue crew socks became my lucky socks. Photos of her
friends and of her life — before I was her life — filled
my photo albums. There she was, on a cable car in San
Francisco (I wondered if maybe I’d ridden the same
one); now she was in Mexico, her head dipped to her
chest because she had fallen asleep while reading on
the beach. She made goofy faces. Blew out birthday
candles. It was strange to think that she existed
before those seven years of my life. But it was even
stranger to think that so many of her things still
existed without her. Her driver’s license, her day
planner, her receipts. Her humble penny collection in
a dusty jar. They had touched her hands, occupied her
thoughts. She was so close.
My fourteenth birthday passed, and with it, the
struggle was over. I couldn’t argue with myself
anymore. I felt a tiny fraction of my heart, this
enormous tiny fraction, chip away.
I watched a home video that had been taped when
I was five, on Christmas morning. I leapt up and
showed her the new Pokémon toy Santa had brought
me, squeaking, “Look!” And she smiled as if she was
just as amazed as I was.
“What is it, Rachael?” she asked.
Everything inside me froze when I heard her voice.
A feeling of dread snaked its way through my veins
and my heart jumped and squirmed in my chest,
forgetting all sense of rhythm.
I realized I couldn’t even remember that voice. It
sounded so foreign, I wanted to cry. How much did I
even remember? I couldn’t even recall the fact that I
unwrapped the next gift, a garish Barbie, with such
joy.
Now the silent memories came creeping in, the
memories I never wrote on the lists because I knew
they could not be forgotten: the powdery, choking
fragrance of white lilies; the impossibly frigid touch
of her skin; the love letters I’d written to her in fat
colorful markers on pristinely folded printer paper,
tucked under her hand — all lost under the earth with
her beauty.
In that dreadful moment of betrayal, in the moment
when her voice rumbled out and didn’t reassure me, I
knew that it wasn’t the numbers that mattered.
The feelings I had felt when she was wrenched
away from me, and still sometimes felt in waves, dull
and sharp and overwhelming in my gut, the feelings I
felt burning in the creases of my eyes and pooling on
my pillow, slamming out of my mouth in sharp gasps
at night — those were proof of what actually mattered.
The facts (oh, to hell with the facts) could be stuffed
into crumbling wallets along with her receipts.
The knowledge that she would have brought those
warm arms around me even when I wrote childish
disjointed letters of “You are meen” and slipped them
under her bedroom door, even when she barely had
the strength to lift her arms at all — that was what
mattered. There was no way to quantify the silent “I
love you, too,” that I knew she wanted to say when she
could barely breathe, even with her oxygen machine,
when I whispered those words to her and they floated
down to softly rest on her cheeks like the sticky tears
that rested on mine. She would be with me even when
I was eighteen, or twenty-one, or whatever form of six
or seven times three or four or five I chose. Even when
I was a hundred years old, she wouldn’t be reduced to
just a fraction of my existence.
On my fifteenth birthday, I felt just fine.
This manuscript was granted a prize in the Avery
Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Contest for the year 2014
at the University of Michigan.
Let me count the ways
by Rachael Lacey, Daily Opinion Columnist
Being is strange
by Carly Snider, Daily Arts Writer
B
eing is strange. The relationship between
yourself and your mind is equally as odd. Your
mind can play tricks on you or nurture you —
it can convince you that you really do pull off those
flare jeans or it can gently bring you the conclusion
that you actually look like a sad, denim-clad John
Travolta á la “Saturday Night Fever.” Everyone has
dealt with periods of mental distress at one time or
another — anxiety, overwhelming stress, depression,
etc. If you haven’t, you’re probably some kind of
deity reincarnate who has managed to surpass the
mental abilities of us mere mortals.
Mental illness is much more pervasive than many
of us know. This is something I didn’t realize until
I came to the University as a freshman last year.
The openness with which the University addresses
student mental health issues blew me away. You
mean you can, like, say the word “depression”
in public and people don’t immediately become
uncomfortably silent? Astonishing.
This transition provided such a stark contrast to
my high school experience. Growing up in mind-
numbing suburbia gifted me little to no exposure
to mental health knowledge or resources. Mental
illness was something so quickly swept under the
rug that even the smallest remnants of its shameful
dust were nowhere to be found. If someone was
thought to be struggling, whispers would float
around suggesting that they had “problems” or that
they (gasp) were in therapy. Depression was a dirty
word.
It was during these years of zero-tolerance that
my depression and anxiety disorder began to creep
up on me — though, at the time, I didn’t know what
was really happening. I knew the symptoms of these
conditions, but, of course, I didn’t learn them from
school — much too taboo — and I couldn’t fathom
the thought that it was me who was suffering. I was
in a constant state of unrest, had no interest in old
passions and couldn’t sleep, but I was fine! I mean,
when someone asks you how you are doing, is there
really any other option but to answer with an upbeat
“OK”?
This charade continued up until the second
semester of my freshman year of college, when
my squirming, scratching psyche reached the
point of implosion. The combination of my alien
environment, increased level of academic rigor
and absence of close friends and family became too
much for me. I started taking Prozac.
What then followed was one of the strangest
evolutions of my life. Placed in my hand by my
oh-so-willing doctor was a pill — a pill that would
apparently shake me from my hopeless, zombie-like
stupor. Admittedly, I was skeptical. I was scared.
I had heard too many complaints that privileged
American youth like myself are over-medicated,
that anti-depressants are used as a cure-all for any
mental trepidation. How could these innocent,
unimposing capsules conquer the demons that I had
been silently attempting to vanquish for years? And
if they did work, who would I be without the illness
that I had carried with me for so long?
But I trusted my parents and I trusted my doctor
and, for the first time in quite some time, I trusted
myself. So I started popping those little white pills
every day. After a while, I noticed that some warmth
seemed to have seeped back into my being. I was
sleeping better, was no longer shaken to the core by
unfamiliar social interactions and found that I was
actually able to enjoy being a college student. I have
since continued on my medication, and have come
to think fondly of those small pills I once held with
such uncertainty.
My biggest problem with being on anti-
depressants was just that — being medicated. There
is such a strong stigma against mental illness in the
United States that I didn’t know how to handle my
newfound identifier. I figured I had two options:
hide it or don’t give a shit. I chose the latter.
Everyone has his or her Goliath — that aspect of
themselves that needs a little push, a little outside
influence to nudge them in the right direction.
Something I have heard recently, probably in some
completely unrelatable black and white PSA, is the
phrase, “It’s OK to not be OK.” This is true, but it
needs to be taken one step further. In facing my
depression, I realized it’s OK for other people to
know you’re not OK. Admitting you are having
trouble with life shouldn’t be followed by a pregnant
silence, but rather by an upwelling of connectivity
with those persons around you. (Read: Everyone is
human, blah, blah, blah, don’t be a jerk.)
But really, grappling with your personal sense of
being is something we all must face at one point or
another. It is that looming confrontation you need
to have with your roommate about how she really
needs to stop eating all of your Cheez-Its — it’s going
to be uncomfortable but you’ll feel so much better
once you do it. I think we can all agree that life is
odd and that the mind is even stranger. Sometimes
it can feel as though your brain is purposefully
working against you, like when you accidentally call
your GSI “mom,” or something.
It might take some time, as was the case with
myself, to be on good terms with your mind, but
it will happen. The most important thing I have
learned through my weird, cringingly cliché-indie-
teen-movie-esque transition is that everything is
temporary. Like that old Greek guy said, “Change
is the only constant.” When you are feeling stuck in
a stagnant state, know that you are allowed to seek
out a tether to grasp, and that needing an anchor is
anything but abnormal.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY CHERYLL VICTUELLES