I miss my friend
W hen I was in eighth grade, my best friend of many years tried to kill herself. It didn’t come as a total surprise because I as well as her and my mutual friends had seen her downward spiral. I guess that’s the part that bothered me the most; maybe if I had spoken to a guidance counselor and said, “look, this girl isn’t balanced,” the guidance counselor wouldn’t have called me one morning to say she was in the hospital. Pills. The psychiatrist I saw for a while afterwards said women usually opted for pills because they were simple and less messy. I didn’t give a shit why my friend chose pills; if her mom hadn’t come home early she would be dead. Of course, if I had said something, she might not have made it that far. The year she spent at an institution I think we all felt was inevitable but none of us had expected it would be the forced stay that resulted from a suicide attempt. She might as well have died because we didn’t see her for the longest time and her name was mentioned in that hushed sort of way like when a white person wants to tell a story about a … black…. person. Like it wasn't supposed to be said. When she finally did come back, her fun spontaneity that was so much a part of her personality was now just the result of a delicate cocktail of prescription medications. I don’t know if they ever got them balanced quite correctly because she never really was the same.
Or was she?
When I say this, I think to myself maybe she was normal again, but as a result of everyone treating her like a china doll, she still seemed strange. The same way as a Persian man might assume that the next guy he meets will think he’s Arab because that’s what everyone else has thought. She assumed I would think she was crazy because everyone else did; therefore, she never acted the same around me. I selfishly wanted my friend back the way she was. They called what she had a mood disorder, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.
On a brief aside, I think Tom Cruise is a stupid dumbass (redundant for emphasis), but I also think there are a lot of aspects of psychiatry that really don’t have much meat to them. The brain is an unpredictable organ. If psychiatry said a man became a rapist because he was molested as a child, then should we lock up all the children who are molested? I guess that’s why I could never fully engage with the psychiatrist I saw after the “incident,” as the guidance counselor called it. I could never believe all that she told me had scientific merit.
If someone spilled soda down the side of his or her shirt, then purposely poured some on the other half so it matched, people would laugh. The shirt is stained anyway, right? My friend did this after the “incident” and the guidance counselor on lunch duty immediately pulled her aside to have a very hushed discussion about returning to a “normal” environment. If you are trying to create a normal environment, why would you treat someone differently?
I think she never got better because she was never treated in a way that encouraged it. I guess I haven’t gotten over it because she never has. I’m still so sad about it all and I don’t know why.