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

