The Valley Summer
There are three things I love the most: spending time with my friends, volunteering with my friends, and listening to music with my friends. And every summer, I get to do the first two. I volunteer as a soccer coach for young students in Northfield for a week in June. It’s called UpWard Soccer Camp (they also host other sports camps). I also volunteer every summer to be a mentor at my church’s VBS (vacation bible school). It’s also a week long, but it’s fun and I get to help younger kids learn about God and that they are never alone. I participate in Youth Explosion (like VBS, but geared for high school students. Then, I went to SoulFest during this past summer. This is kind of where everything really hit rock bottom. I had been depressed for most of my life, but always just kind of brushed it under the rug. My mom and I don’t have the best relationship. In fact, it’s deteriorating as we speak. When I was born, neither of my parents wanted me. My dad was a strung out crack addict, and he left when he found out my mom was pregnant. My mom was also a drug addict and an alcoholic And my mom set up an adoption for me.
The adoption fell through, but my mom REALLY didn’t want to keep me. So, the family she was going to give me to (a nice Christian family in Texas), they said they would take me even though they had received another child. But. my mother had decided, for whatever reason, to be my mother.
Well, this particular summer, we had a huge falling out, me and my mother. I wanted to go to this music festival called SOulFest. It’s this huge Christian music festival in New Hampshire at Gunstock Mountain Resort. It was beautiful. I met a lot of really nice people. But...the people I went with, weren’t very nice. I ended up alone every, single day. I was sick. At this point, I knew nothing about my health conditions, and how sick I was. I had two appendicitis scares in the same day, and my mother refused to come get me. I was alone in the middle of thousands of people, and no one could see me. Nor did they care to look.
I didn’t know that I was depressed. I didn’t know what depression was. I didn’t think that I could have it. Or that I could ever become depressed. I had friends. I had a mom. I had a sister. I had no idea how seriously MESSED up my life was going to get. Or just how far I had let myself fall. I walked around for hours. I don’t know what time it was, but I had decided to walk into the lake and stand there until I got hypothermia. And if I didn’t, I would drown myself. I was in tears. I had no idea what was going on. I wanted to be in control of my body, of my emotions. But I couldn’t.. That night was the worst night of my life. I will never forget that night.
When I came home a day later, I was mute. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I couldn’t think about anything. I didn’t want to be around anyone. I started to lock myself in my room for days. I stopped eating. I drank nothing but water. I just...shut down. I had regressed to a state of subsistence. Eating and drinking just enough to keep my body functioning. I had shut down completely. Nothing mattered.
Commercial Break
is really the meat of my memoir. I learned how to stand on my own. Like, in all honestly, I can barely stand on my own two feet and not fall and get hurt (physically). I am such a clutz. I own eight pairs of crutches. It’s like one of those Disney Channel things where they make a commercial about these kids who collect things. Mine would probably sound like this:
“Hi, my name is Cheyenne, and I collect emergency room crutches.
I started collecting them when I was in the fourth grade. I got my first pair when I fell down a hill, shattered a growth plate in my foot, and then walked on it for a few weeks. I don’t really like or dislike collecting crutches, I just kind of keep them.. My most recent pair that I acquired was from a knee injury during my lacrosse season. I’m Cheyenne, and you’re watching Disney Channel.”
Yeah. I have no life. So BACK TO THE SHOW, FOLKS!
Back to School....What?
School started back up in the fall (as always). And I was still really quiet. I started talking to my friends again, but I have never been the same since that summer. I don’t know how, or when, or why we became friends, but my friend Caton and I got REALLY close this year. Now (as a sophomore) I was finally “cool”. I wasn’t fresh meat anymore. I had a place; or so I thought. I had found out a few months into school that my childhood best friend and cousin, Jj, had overdosed, and they didn’t know if he was going to make it. My mom never sits down and talks with me privately unless someone has died, something really bad has happened, or she is blaming me for something that is going wrong in her life. So when she sat me down after school this day, I knew something was up. She just looked at me. She looked at
me and stared at me, but she didn’t say a word. She started crying. And I was really scared. She just looked at me and said, “Jj overdosed, and they don’t think he is going to make it.” I was in shock.
Have you ever lost your best friend? They (or you) moved away, you guys stopped talking, or maybe they were in a different grade and one of you moved on early. Well, focus on that feeling. How sad you were and how lost you felt. Like someone had just cut off your arm, right? Well, for me? I had died, too. I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t go visit him; I couldn’t call him or talk to him; the only person who could tell me what was going on was his mom (my aunt), and even she didn’t have time to text me what was going on. I was so scared. Everyday I wondered if I would come home and my mom would tell me that he had died. Living in that kind of fear and wonder every day changes you. It changes the way you look at the world, and the way you act around other people. SOmething in you just clicks into place, and all of sudden every message about suicide, every campaign to end bullying, every post on Facebook, Twitter, and TUmblr about self-harm and eating disorders: all of that becomes real. And all you want to do, is make sure that no one ever has to go through what you did. You become this other person. This person whose sole goal in life is to make sure that no one has to watch their loved ones sit there and hurt and slowly die and waste away inside, KNOWING that there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about it. That is one of the most extreme changes a person can go through.
I remember sitting with Caton telling her about how when Jj and I would play Spider-Man when we were little. I describe to her him jumping off of my dresser and running to my bed to cut the pretend ropes off my wrists, and beat up the Green
Goblin and save the day. Caton and I laughed so much that day. After that, I realized that I had found my best friend. My sister. My other half. The one person who would stick by me and do what she could to keep me safe, and that I would give my life for her. We were and still are inseparable.
To this day, Caton and I talk about everything. SO when she told me around Christmas that she was “a cutter”, I was lost again. The candlelight in my big dark room had been blown out once again. When she told me this, I came clean, too. I told her how when I tried to commit suicide this summer, even though I lived physically, I died emotionally, and mentally. I had started cutting, too. And to be completely honest, I still do sometimes. We promised each other that we would do whatever it took to stop. And we did for a while. But when her sister moved out and her mom started yelling at her for no reason, and being really mean and rude, she started cutting again.
My mom, every day I would come home, and she would tell me that my belly was big, or that I was gaining a lot of weight, or that I needed to stop eating. Sometimes she would even go as far to come right out and call me fat. I hurt. I hurt so much, that I became mute again. I decided that I wasn’t going to eat ever again, and that by this next summer I would have a beautiful flat stomach, toned arms and legs, and I would get a light tan. SO when I come back to school for my Junior year of highschool, I would be pretty like the rest of the girls at school. I stopped eating. I started making myself throw up. I did whatever I could to eat less, lose weight, and be prettier. But inside, I just kept hurting. I kept hurting more and more. And I didn’t lose any weight. In fact, I gained weight. My mom noticed that I had “cut down” on my eating, but still commented on my weight gain.
SO I went to my doctor. He had be do a blood test, and he ran a few other tests as well, and he told me I had Raynaud's Disease. It’s a rare blood disease in the U.S. (it’s more common in the UK and Europe), where your blood will clot in your appendages (like your fingers and toes) and your hands turn blood from the lack of circulation, and then white from the lack of oxygen. And when the attack is over, they turn bright red from the blood rushing back into the appendages.
A few weeks later, my doctor called back and said it wasn’t Raynaud’. It was hypothyroidism. My thyroid was not working properly, and my metabolism had slowed down to almost a dead stop. My hair was falling out by the handfuls, and I was showing signs of serious depression (no kidding, right?). And so I started taking a medicine for it. I only took this medicine for about a month. And within that month, I went from around 18o pounds to 140 pounds. I went to go see a pediatrician who supposedly was very experienced in this field. And he told me I had depression, and that I should get a counselor and see what they think. And he dismissed it. Oh, and I mention that he had me stop my meds COMPLETELY? Like, cold turkey? Yeah. Well, now my thyroid is back to almost a dead stop. And I am even more depressed. I am now on an antidepressant, an acid reducer (for my stomach from throwing up all the time), and have it written on my medical history and notices/allergies that I cannot, under any circumstances, take and anti-inflammatory because of my stomach issues.
I have a lot to get off my chest, so I am sorry if this is really long. and boring. But I need to.
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