Dear O'Connor | Teen Ink

Dear O'Connor

October 22, 2013
By Anonymous

O'Connor,

Today is the ninth day i haven’t been able to write you and complain about my feelings and lack of friends. I've decided to embrace the fact that your must be confused or even concerned about what happened to me after i told you that i was suicidal and didn't come to school the day after or the next entire week and didn't leave an explanation. I’m typing this to explain since i can’t have the journal i’m assuming you filled with your concerns concerning my mental state. Well, i’m fine in a teen psychotic sort of way.

Of course on the twentieth, the b day after i wrote you that letter in the journal we've been sharing for the past few weeks, you must have assumed by now that it was the psychologist who had concerns for me. You must have assumed i talked to people or appeared to be a typical ungrateful,insecure, and unidentifiable teen. You were wrong O'Connor. I hope you realize that i call you that in my head when i think of what your face might look like and what advice you’d give me. I hope you know that i goggled you too. I couldn't find you because you picked the name of an author,prick. of course you don’t know what it looks like.

I’ll describe it for you later in the real journal.

Thursday night i when i visited the psych who turned out to be as social worker she asked me about my feelings. I told her i cut and that i was suicidal. I told her i was tired and that i was losing interest in my life and that i want to end it by cutting my self with glass. she did what all the people I've talked to have done. She looked as if i had told her the opposite. Like i told her i wanted to create lives with glass instead of scrape away my own.

She told my mother i needed to to go to a hospital when she asked my mom back into the room because of course my mother knows i don’t communicate directly with her near me. She told me i should go to the hospital and my mother agreed hesitantly. She asked if she was sure. Couldn't it wait? And i thought about the day before around the same time when she said nothing would change and i’d still have all my chores and smiled at the social worker who thought i was normal as my thought whizzed around my brain and out through of my eyes.

I hated the pressure in my head. I hated the way it made everything heavy and made me feel the same numb tiredness i felt when i got up, except for the depressing moments witch turned up every ten minutes. Like, the way the sky s*** rain when i was walking home a few days before and people drove past me. And the way people smile like the world was beautiful while all i saw was pure s*** in vague writing prompts i would have goggled myself months ago.

I remember telling my mother that i had depression and that she needed to take me to a doctor. I remember her rolling her eyes and looking at me like i was stupid. I told her i had all the symptoms. She told me to take and shower and then come back and talk about it. The water didn't fix my depression. She concluded that i wasn't getting enough sleep so i started going to bed at nine o’clock.

The next day i was called down to the main office which you still have yet to comment on, which is the true moment all this s*** started. It was a week before i went to the social worker and got sent to loony town. He asked me if i cut like i everyone else did and i pulled up my sleeve. I shouldn't have.
I ended eating lunch around a whole period early and going to the wrong class on the way back to reality.

The social worker called and Sheppard said they had a bed available. I was told to sit in the waiting room while my mother and the lady talked further about plans. They came out at the same time while i was examining a magazine looking for imperfections in models. My mother asked my if i was ready to go and i got up. The social worker told me she was proud of me for facing my problem. Her words danced in the air and my mother soaked them up and repeated versions of them throughout the mostly silent ride to the hospital.She looked nervous. I've had no memory of a time where she wasn't in control of how unbroken she appeared to me. She gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

I thought about books I've read where people see things they never imagine in hospitals with the other patients. I imagine i would be going somewhere without other people. I imagine sitting in a quiet room telling my soak to white faced men. I was mostly wrong. I didn't feel that way. I didn't feel.

When we walked into the waiting room and stood nervously in front of all of the maybe four people in the waiting room already, part of me wanted to hear her say it. My daughter is suicidal with a plan. I could see it on her lips after the lady at the front desk looked up. I thought back to what the social worker said and how exactly she should say it. I cringed. I waited we were taken in to a back room after no obvious injury was pointed out.

We found out that there were no beds available. My mother argued with more passion then I've ever heard in her voice about the fact that the social worker had called “not twenty minutes ago”. We waited around in the hospital across the street GBMC. We watched the floor and listen to an old lady apologizing to her daughter for being a handful. I didn't look at the green bracelet around me wrist. Doctors walked past me every few minutes. I was tired.

I was led into a room around five feet in front of me. I was relieved. .i was asked questions i repeated my plans for death the second time. They took my blood. I pissed in a cup. I was weighed and measured for a height. I was scanned for weapons and patted down. I was told to wait for the third time that night i can recall.
I was lead into the hospital’s larger waiting room to wait again. It had TVs we didn't bother to change the channel of even though neither of us watched baseball. We were then led though a hallway that was decorated with sea creatures with eyes that followed you and lights that sparkled. I was eventually put in a room with a bed and TV and told to change into an ugly hospital outfit that was burgundy all over and fealty.

An irritating psych came in and bothered me with questions about how i felt and asked if there was anything he shouldn't tell my mother i shrugged. Why the hell not? I was wrong again. He asked if i was on drugs because i couldn't keep i contact and he told me i should have taken the chance to tell him things not to tell her because he didn't have limits or some s***. He concluded it was an emergency. He told me he was proud of me.

When he left my mother slept in the chair next to my bed and i slept on my stomach until i was awoken at around 12 in the morning by hospital people telling me that there was a bed open. I was driven across the street in an ambulance. I was given i blanket when i shivered in surely not that cold hospital air by one of the hot hospital guards. We waited some more.

I was wheeled onto an elevator and out of the same one. I hopped of my cart. I took of all my clothes and spun. I got more blood drawn the next morning next to an adorable long haired girl who looked just as depressed as me. I tried to be casual at breakfast when i got my tray and ate at a table in the same room with the other 14 other girls alone. I tried to be casual when people cried, when i did, and when i typed this for you. I learned i wasn't the worst. I saw that normal people my age had boyfriends of girlfriends. I learned that most freaks are non-stereotypical. We're not freaks.

-The Kid


The author's comments:
My story written to my mentor

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