We, Alone

I tried to commit suicide when I was 12 years old.  I swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin, wrote a note, and laid down on my bed to wait for death. 

Instead of dying, I threw up on my bedroom floor.

I realize now how young I was and how abnormal it is for a 12-year-old to try to commit suicide, but at the time, I was living in tsunami of unbearable emotional and psychological pain.

Instead of attempting suicide again, I learned how to tame the tsunami with booze, drugs, and sex.   At twelve, I started smoking pot, drinking Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog, Southern Comfort, and Schnapps.  I also started popping pills.  Anything anyone put in the palm of my hand ended up in my system.  I did LSD, too.  Lots of it.

The reason I swallowed a bottle of aspirin and later became the poster child for childhood addiction is because I was alone, ostracized, frightened.  A few weeks before my 12^th birthday, the night before Mother’s Day, I was manipulated, drugged, gang-raped, and dumped in a ditch. My parents, fundamentalist Christians with not a high school diploma between them, found me battered, bruised, delirious, and terrified and decided to take me to church to have “hands laid” on me.  I was told I was possessed by the devil.

The folks at school weren’t much better.  The adults treated me like an annoying curiosity, not quite prepared to ask about the bruises but not quite prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt.  The kids at school either didn’t believe me when I explained the bruises, or, if they did believe me, labeled me a slut.  So, I was possessed, a liar, and a slut.  Of course, I wanted to die.

Living in that state of extreme aloneness was a form of torture.  It felt like what I imagine solitary confinement feels like.  It’s a helpless feeling.  And I couldn’t shake it.  I tried talking to people about what happened to me, and I did have some sympathetic friends, but my family pretended nothing happened, the adults at school stopped considering me a bright kid and started seeing me as one of the “troubled” kids, and it seemed the only people who wanted anything to do with me were the criminal types I met in my neighborhood.  They took me under their wing.  They showed me the ropes.  But that story is for another time.

This story is about being alone.  This story is about what it feels like when a person is left adrift. This story is about how a little girl who eventually, through time and lots of counseling and reading and work, grew stronger and fierce and pondered why why why and finally came to the conclusion that what people want most in all the world is a feeling of community.  People want to be heard.  People want to belong.

I never felt like I belonged anywhere.  No matter what group of friends I was hanging with, or what institution or company I worked for, or what neighborhood I lived in, I have felt on the outside.  Part of this is because of my unusual past.  But mostly, I feel like this because I’m a bisexual gender nonconforming woman raised in a time, the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” 70s, when people were dismissive of bisexuality and the language for gender fluid or trans people didn’t yet exist, so we didn’t exist.  Only rock stars were given the freedom to gender bend, and then only the most subversive of the rock stars.  Homosexuality was still hidden, even the rock stars hid it.  Movie stars hid it.  Everyone was hiding.  If the most famous and powerful people couldn’t come out in to the light, how was I supposed to?

My first taste of aloneness was after I was gang-raped, but that taste of aloneness lasted for most of my adult life.  The only thing that kept me from being swallowed up by the aloneness was my early hallucinations on “acid.”  When I did LSD as a kid, I thought I saw God.  I thought I saw connections.  I thought I saw a web of energy that connected all creatures, animals, plants, people, rocks.  No. No.  I’m sure I saw that web.  And the fact that we are all connected kept me from feeling completely alone.  I’ve held on to that sensation of connection all these years.  The memory of that hallucination has kept me alive.  Knowing that I’m only a small part of a greater whole calms me, because even though I may or may not be outwardly accepted by my family, neighbors, peers, colleagues, and friends, I know that we are all connected, like it or not.

Yet, we act as though we are separate, and this separateness is the cause of our demise.   Not until we see how we are all connected will we begin to heal, will we stop hurting ourselves and our planet.  When I was 12 years old, I felt so alone, so ostracized, I couldn’t see a future for myself.   When I started tripping on LSD, I saw something that no amount of words or poetry or philosophy or psychology could have explained to me, and this something triggered a survival instinct in me. 

Not until we see how we are all connected will we being to heal.

When I finally weaned myself off the booze and drugs and looked around the world with clarity, I continued to see the divine connectedness in all of us, and I started paying closer attention to the world outside of my pain and the pain we humans inflict upon ourselves, and I started watching the birds, and the trees, and plants, and the seasons and seeing, even while not tripping, the connections, the interdependency, how fungus helps the trees grow, how birds and bees pollinate the plants, how the apex predator’s slaughter hurts us all, how we humans fight over resources that are more abundant than we’ve been brainwashed to admit, and how a little girl can be shamed for being naïve and brutalized, because we can’t seem to admit even today, even with #MeToo and #Time’sUp, that we create our own evil here on earth, we create our own devils, we create them from our insistence on being disconnected, our arrogance, our insistence that we alone are in control.