didn’t really need depressants. I had antidepressants, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, expiring in the top drawer of my vanity. One kind, I remembered, had the narrowest therapeutic range, prescribed at a level just south of toxic. Tofranil. I opened a new window and searched for it: lethal at 6.7 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. With 25 milligrams in a pill, that would mean…seventeen pills. Maybe twenty just to be safe. There was something satisfying and circular about it, the clear A to B of my parents plying me with the long line of pharmaceuticals that would eventually end me, too. I padded into the bedroom, pulled the orange bottle out of my dresser, and sat on the bed, clutching it in my hands like a chalice.
My eyes fell on my old diary, on the floor near a pile of shoes, and I picked it up, dreamlike, and pressed it open, the gluey pages crackling under the entries I’d pasted in.
I hate my parents and my teacher and my classmates and everyone here, so I’m going to become a writer and get rich and move away from them all. And I’m starting right here, right now.
I closed my eyes and lay back on the bed, the notebook spread open across my abdomen. What a miserable time that had been, so miserable I’d spent two decades smashing it into the smallest lockbox in the deepest corner of my mind. It occurred to me for the first time that my disasters, the bloody calamities of my own making, came like clockwork: at thirteen, twenty-three, and now, pathetically, thirty-three. Jesus’s final age.
Tears slipped down my temples, the right and then the left. I thought back to the night that had started it all. I was about to start eighth grade, but tall, suddenly and freakishly bigger and stronger than both my parents. But no, that’s not the real origin; my parents had been suspicious of me for years by then, ever since I’d turned seven and begun to grow my own personality. I was a sullen child, moody and obsessive. And prone to tantrums, anger building up like steam under my skin and leading to something akin to a panic attack, though nobody called it that. “I can’t get my breath down to here,” I remember telling my mom, pointing at the bottom of my sternum and tearing up in alarm. And instead of acting, she watched me in fright until I was screaming and stomping and then called my dad down to spank me for my bad behavior. I never hurt anyone, but teachers labeled me a problem child and sent me home with pink slips and demerits for my parents to sign. Each one felt more confusing than the last, and after the panic was labeled anger enough times, I began to see it that way, too, the charged feeling blasting out of me on a shorter and shorter fuse.
I intuited that they wished I were chipper and sweet, like the other kids. When I wasn’t acting out, I daydreamed through class and got too entranced by chapter books to answer when adults called for me; at the principal’s urging, Mom took me to a hearing specialist, convinced I must be partially deaf, but I passed the aural tests with flying colors. According to the audiologist, I was just ignoring them. I remember Dad’s frustration that night and the bright, flapping knowledge that I’d done something wrong, though I wasn’t quite sure what.
The week after the hearing test, the first pill appeared next to my morning bowl of cereal. Ritalin, to help me focus. I began getting headaches, and at night sleep became elusive; as my Mickey Mouse clock ticked, I crafted pillow forts for stuffed animals and imagined the four legs of my bed came alive and whisked us off to foreign lands. Later, I switched to Adderall, which dried out my mouth and knotted my stomach. My spirits sank, but my grades improved. Dad kept taking me to the gun range, muttering about how I needed to master discipline. It was the one place where I knew he wouldn’t yell at me.
And then I was thirteen, sullied by hormones and bad skin and inexplicable feelings, fury and fear and lust and self-hatred in a constant spinning wheel. One night, my parents and I were arguing about whether or not I had to keep taking piano lessons—a stupid, banal fight, but it became bigger, much bigger.