Life As A Failure

LIFE AS A FAILURE

By Derek Wheatley

OREGON

Dear ---------,

Here I am now; red marks across my neck that itch and sting. Didn’t Bob use to say that I was no good at anything? Well, we can now add suicide to that bulging list. My neck didn’t snap, neither did the rope, nope, it was the damn beam. Now I have a sprained ankle that is swelling (just like the previously mentioned list of my failures), abrasions across my throat that shock every time my Adam’s apple moves and that all-too-familiar feeling of a bruised ego. Okay, I know my choice of a place to die was bad but I did pick the thickest beam of that old barn. I used the ladder to get up there. I shimmied out to the middle, tied the knot that I had been practising for a number of days previously and you know what? I didn’t feel afraid. I wasn’t trembling or sweating, my heartbeat felt normal. If anything, I felt euphoric; this strange high that I’ve only previously got from a bottle of good wine or from that time I bungeed off the crane at the fair a couple of years ago. I sat up on that beam, looking down at the mouse droppings and the odd length of straw that moved in tune with the soft breeze coming through the open door – which I had purposely left open so someone would eventually find me in my hanging, post-mortem state. So I let my weight take me. I allowed gravity to pull my body down. Wham! Snap! The floor was coming too close; I landed on my damn ankle. And what was euphoria turned to embarrassment and the shameful hobble back home. I’m glad I didn’t meet anyone on the way. How would I explain my neck? Which now feels as if it is on fire! I’m such an idiot. I wonder if the barn is still standing. I’m sure that beam was the main support of the structure. Hang on; I need to put something on my neck....

My neck is now covered in some white stuff that, according to the label, is good for scrapes and cuts. It’s as greasy as hell (as you can see from the diaphanous stains on the page now). God damn it, I washed my hands three times and it still wouldn’t remove this shit. I’m even having trouble holding the pen. I’ve got a pack of frozen vegetables on my ankle. I didn’t know that they were open when I pulled them from the freezer. Some stray peas and kernels of corn may be found under the fridge, slowly defrosting before moulding and then what? What happens after the mould sets in? Do they deteriorate into thin air, or will we have a farm of mould under the fridge? This is starting to sound like an analogy for life, isn’t it? I feel I am digressing. I just opened the good wine; drinking from the bottle makes me feel grubby but good. Large mouthfuls are better than small sips, especially for this strange mood I find myself in. I saw Martha this morning on what I thought would be my last walk through town. She was dropping a letter in the post box outside Kmart. She has dyed her hair raven-black. I bet it looks blue under artificial lighting. She is gorgeous! If things had worked out the way I had dreamed they would, at the prom all those years ago, Martha and I could have been married with a couple of kids by now. But things obviously worked the way they were supposed to. It’s no one’s fault – apart from mine, maybe?

So why did I try to rid the world of myself? There is a short answer to that, somewhere in the back of my busy mind, I’m sure of that. But I can’t find it. So you will have to listen (read) to the long one. Dad died. I was 9 years old. I loved him more than I knew at the time. Of course the fact that I had no idea what love really was until I was 16 didn’t help my judgment on how much I cared about him or how much I would miss him, as I stood by his graveside. I didn’t cry. Why didn’t I cry? Is it possible to cry on the inside? Do there have to be tears to show that you are grieving? I remember how the traces of soil stuck to the palm of my hand. It must have been wet. It slapped the top of the coffin with an ominous thump. That thump was so unforgiving, so final. So many pairs of eyes were on me. It felt like they were there for a show. Looking back, I feel that some of them were willing me to cry. I remember trying. I thought of Gervis the gerbil who had died a couple of months before my father. I cried when he died. I thought if I could summon up those feelings for Gervis, I could cry for Dad, but my damn tear ducts wouldn’t listen to my brain’s commands. My eyes would remain dry, the crowd would remain disappointed. Two days later I tore down all the posters in my room – in what was my first ‘out-of-body-experience’, if you want to put it that way. Batman, Spiderman, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, they all lay on my bedroom floor in crumpled and torn segments. I didn’t get in trouble. I was just told to tidy my room a couple of days later. By that time, Michael Jordan’s face was covered in trainer mud and toast crumbs.

After that, I found Oregon to be a strange place. It was so beautiful but so empty. Beautifully-empty. The furthest I have ever been from here (to this day) is Tacoma, Washington. We went to see a band called Gross Indifference. Do you remember that time? I was so excited and nervous, oh, and I nearly forgot......drunk! My first time drinking alcohol. I was 15. Bob had come on the scene a couple of years before that; trying to fill my father’s shoes. He wasn’t my stepdad yet, but I knew that he would be one day, even then. Sure he was nice for the first couple of months, but it didn’t last. He quickly turned into an ass. The first time he told me that I was less-than-useless, I took it on the chin. Little did I know that this would be his continued way of describing me! Way to boost a boy’s confidence, Bob! Where was I? Oh yeah, Gross Indifference. Marvin’s dad drove us up there. We listened to Nirvana on the trip. I thought Kent (Marvin’s dad) was so cool to allow us to listen to Nirvana in his car. Bob wouldn’t even allow The Rolling Stones in ours! Kurt Cobain was howling at the moon and yet Kent just stared straight ahead at the road, a strange look of satisfaction and fatherly pride on his face whenever he glanced over at Marvin in the passenger seat. He had no idea that the bottles of ginger ale we were all drinking from were laced with liquor from his fully-stocked liquor cabinet. We were all swirling by the time we got to the venue. I had to push Leonard from the backseat. He fell out the door. Kent didn’t notice though. He told us that he would be back to pick us up at 10:45pm. The venue was dark and smelly and great. Our first concert - except Leonard, who had seen Pearl Jam with his parents the year before. Pearl Jam had tumbled from Nirvana’s shadow by then and had morphed into little more than a Neil Young tribute act. Grunge died the day that shotgun bullet turned Kurt Cobain’s lights out. I don’t remember any of the Gross Indifference concert. It was like I wasn’t there. I still have their first – and only – album somewhere. From what I remember, it was terrible but great when I was 15. But I had discovered alcohol. I had discovered a faithful companion that has rarely left my side in recent times. That reminds me!

It wasn’t long after that that the gloom of existence fell on me. I started to read books that made me think about how my life was so contained in this little town, in my little house. I had no siblings. Bob had taken over with his dumb rules. He was like a watered-down version of Robert De Niro in ‘This Boy’s Life’ (you’ve seen that right?). He was a version of him, without the physical abuse, but the psychological abuse was similar. Had I turned into Tobias Wolfe?! Deep down Bob is a coward. When I outgrew him he began to keep his comments to himself. But his early tormenting had left invisible scars. I’m not saying he gave me a complex, but it wasn’t too far off. Of course he is irrelevant now. He would introduce me as his stepson; I would introduce him as Bob. My brain was nagging me by the time I was 18: “Don’t go there, it will be too busy. You know you don’t like people or crowds.” “Don’t answer that phone; they will only want something from you.” I know this sounds a lot like schizophrenia but I assure you it’s not. It’s my own voice, not someone else’s. It’s was my conscious and sub-conscious joining forces to isolate me and cut me off from the world. I remember clearly being dragged to the hospital by my then-girlfriend Carrie. Depression? Are you serious Dr. Weinberg?
“Yes son. It seems that your answers to the questionnaire here are more than alluding to this. I will prescribe something for you to take to increase the serotonin levels in your brain. I will also refer you to my friend Mr. Kettle for a talk.”
I laughed; not because my diagnosis was in anyway funny. No, I laughed at the therapist’s name: Dr Kettle! Would a depressed person laugh at something like that? Well yes, yes they would. Damn, did I cry that night? I soaked both of Carrie’s shoulders. By the time my appointment with Dr. Kettle (ha ha, gets me every time) came around, I was single again. Apparently it wasn’t working out between me and Carrie. It wasn’t because of the depression though, oh no, of course not. She swore on that!!!

What I still wonder to this day is: was the psychiatric hospital entirely necessary? Dr. Kettle recommended the stay after only my second appointment with him. I thought you had to talk about suicide or mass-murder before you were sent there? I hadn’t mentioned either of them, had I? No I hadn’t, I was positive. Was it because I liked crying more than laughing, the rain more than the sun, the night more than the day? That hospital had no time, no light, no seasons; just ‘loonies’, as I once called them. But not anymore though, no,no,no. Because then I would, by definition, be a looney myself and I wasn’t, I’m not. I swear; and this is a proper swear, not like Carrie’s swears! I watched TV all day in there. I was numbed by the piles of pills they were giving me. I was almost rendered comatose by them; catatonic with my eyes just-about open. Visiting hours came and went in blurs and chunks of comfortable solitude. Group therapy was revealing in funny little ways. I rarely indulged the therapist or the other ‘residents’ – as I now called them – with my stories. I didn’t know how I felt. I left it up to the doctors to decide that. Ironically, it was only when I got in there that I started to think of suicide. I hated life but never wanted out of it until I was incarcerated behind those bright white walls of insane ramblings and rabid outer and interaction.

Oh I forgot, with my wandering mind, I left out prom night. The night where Martha turned me down before the dessert had even arrived at our table, and Carrie arrived on the scene before the cream and chocolate covered plates were removed by the smartly-turned-out waiters. I took Martha to the prom in the hope that our friendship would blossom into something more passionate; even amidst the drunken girls and testosterone swollen boys. I had loved her for a couple of years then, since I was 16. I asked her straight out that night, just after dinner, if she thought that we could ever be ‘more than just friends?’ No we couldn’t apparently, because her heart was elsewhere. Time moved in spasms of awkwardness. I said something to Martha that hurt her, I can’t remember what, but she ran off to the restroom with a clump of tissue under her right eye; a dam to hold back the threat of spoiled mascara. Carrie sat down beside me. She looked as miserable as I felt. I kind of knew her and kind of didn’t. “Where’s your date?” I asked. My voice was holding itself together against all odds, against the tides of barely post-teen adolescent emotions. “See that guy over there?” I did, he was dancing/gyrating with a pretty blond on the dance floor. His hands roved around her body like a suspicious security guard at an airport. We talked. Martha didn’t return to the table. I saw her leave alone, sometime after midnight. We never talked properly again after that night. She was my first love and first heartbreak. Love, I found out that night, is tough and rarely worth the effort it needs to blossom. She’s with Danny now, as you know. I don’t think I ever told you that story before, did I? Well, I left with Carrie that night. She was a distraction for a while, until more pressing issues came to the fore and she departed with dust rising behind her hurried footsteps.

I left the hospital, not so much a changed man, more a man who had his eyes opened wide to the wonders of mental health care in our state and the readily availability of ‘mind-numbing’ prescription drugs. Every month I took my little white slip of paper to the pharmacy, who in turn handed me a bag-full of small bottles, filled with my little pills that swept away all emotions, good and bad. I was no longer a 3-dimensional, animated being. I was now 2-D and empty. I spoke very little (as you know). I strangely existed on a diet of 2 hours sleep a night. I grew my hair to hide my face. I grew my fingernails to scrape through the skin on my arms so I could see that I still had blood in my body and was not just some robot; which was how I felt. Self-harm was just an extension of being to me at the time. Why do people get so upset about it? It is SELF-harm. It isn’t hurting you or anyone else, it is hurting me. I use ‘hurting’ in the broadest sense possible here, because it doesn’t hurt really. It just reaffirms and exhilarates in equal measure. I’m trying to help you understand all of this, by the way. This is not a letter to make you cry, or to make you feel sad, or to make you think: “Gee, could I have done more to help?”. It’s not for any of those reasons – and no, you couldn’t have done anymore than you did. I think of people like Bob as I write this. He makes people feel depressed and sad by his dumb, insensitive actions. Again, it is not his fault either. He is just another part of the grand machine, a tiny rusting cog!

By what, 23? I had given up on self-harm, but I remain proud of my scars. It had its function at the time but became mundane and unimportant in my life. I stopped bringing the little slips of paper to the pharmacy too. Call it a revelation in a dream. Call it whatever you want really. I needed to feel again; even if it was pain that I was feeling, or isolation, or depression, or just plain blah! And it came back, that small seven letter word: feeling! It came back like a tangled rope; full of complications, frustrations, anger. But the single most important thing was that it was back. I would like to say it felt great but it really just presented itself as a kind of paradox. Feeling was back but depression was its chief, its marching leader. And I tried to ride that steed with at least a tiny bit of control. But I kept falling off, I keep falling off. I borrowed two self-help books from the library a while back: ‘How to Cope with Depression’ and ‘Life with Depression: How to Help Yourself Recover.’ It seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem with the first title was the word ‘Cope’. Coping, is that the best that we sufferers can hope for? The problem with the second title was ‘Life with Depression’; it sounded like some kind of prison sentence that had been handed down to the reader. “I find the defendant guilty of being a depressive person. I sentence him/her to life inside himself/herself.” Thank you judge, thanks for everything!

The self-help books still sit in my room, totting up library fees every passing week. I read through them once. They just pissed me off. Maybe deep down I wanted to keep them from the library; keep them from another person who might be looking for a cure. You won’t find it between these pages I’m afraid. Take your pills, scratch your arms, hang yourself in a barn, do whatever you like, just please stop yourself from reading these insignificant tomes, written by authors who have studied, but never suffered from depression. That would be my advice to people! Not to you of course, you are fine. You are, and always have been, just great. I know you wanted me to talk about all this with you. But it seems easier to put ink to paper. Have I told you much? Probably not! You’ve seen the scars. I caught you looking at them on a couple of occasions. On those days when it was just too hot to keep my arms covered and I had no choice but to wear short sleeves. Why didn’t you ask about them? Were you embarrassed, appalled, afraid? Oh, it doesn’t matter now I guess.

So what defines me? Depression? When I walk through Main Street, do the people in-the-know – as it were – see me as me, or do they see me as the poor soul who suffers from a mental illness? I hope I’m just plain old me. It’s not that I care about what they think; it’s just that I don’t want to be typecast like I am playing some sort of a role in their lives. I wasn’t always depressed, well not in the true sense of the word. I just grew into it. I bet you are wondering why I went to the barn, aren’t you? Well I’ll tell you. I went because it was the barn or nothingness. I know death is nothingness too but it is nothingness without the pain, if you can understand that. The other nothingness is my life here in Oregon. I love three people in total. You are one and there are two others. I know you know who I’m talking about. I did consider all of your feelings. But I felt you are all strong and would get past the loss with time. I’m just a void in your lives. I rarely fill that void with anything worthwhile. So what is a void if it disappears? A void-less void? A double negative! So I went to the barn guilt-free, feeling as if the world would keep turning and that the grass would keep growing for you without me.

I’ve finished the wine now; my teeth have turned that strange purple-y colour that they get after the sediment of the wine clings onto the plaque and enamel. I think I have said all I wanted to say, which was the intention of this letter in the first place of course! I will brush my teeth and shove my toothbrush in my packed bag. It’s getting dark out. You know how I love walking at night? I may not like it so much with this limp; but the frozen vegetables helped a little. I had to throw them in the garbage though, as they got all soggy. I have my ankle strapped tight. The darkness seems to be an appropriate place for me to head in to because I don’t know what I'll do or where I'll go, but I know I’ll be leaving Oregon. I’ll check on the barn on the way past. Fingers crossed - that like me - it is still standing and will live to fight another day. I know you will survive without me. At least this way you won’t truly be ‘without’ me. Let me assure you that I will still be breathing wherever I end up. I can only leave you with all my love, and thoughts. I will be in touch, but it may not be for a little while.

Lots of love, --------- xxx

P.S. My key is under the front mat.

P.P.S. I took a scarf to cover my neck. Turns out turquoise is my colour after all!

The End