A story of healing

November 29, 1998

Three days past Thanksgiving, two days after the break-up. I had cried for a while, hung out with a friend, and was ready to move on. At least, I thought I was. And then I showed up at work, and he was there. Smug, cheerful, as though nothing had happened to soil his weekend. Talking to me as though nothing had changed, like things would instantly be the same. He was on his way out the door when I came in, for which I was glad. I didn’t want to let him see me shed another tear over this.

It’s not like I loved him, I still had no clue what love felt like. But I had shut everyone else out of my life because at the time I didn’t know any better. I had made him the center of my world because I wanted to love him--I wanted to know what it felt like. He had told me that he loved me three weeks in (which I’m certain was just a ploy to get me into bed) and for the following four months he had been trying to coax me to say it back. He wanted leverage so that he could say, “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t hold out on me.”

The truth of the matter is, I don’t think that ten years together would have made me love him. But at the time I was convinced that I would learn to love him despite the fact that he met very few of my standards. I thought that I would learn to like being kissed by him, being let go quickly when we hugged, being practically ignored in public, being pressured to have sex before marriage. I thought I could get over the fact that he called himself an atheist, that he talked down to me because I wasn’t an engineering major, that he absolutely despised kids. I thought it would all work itself out one day.

Perhaps this is why when he called it off, took away my chance to make him the man I wanted him to be, I was completely devastated. I had halfway been expecting it, and yet when it happened, I was appalled. I couldn’t believe that we were through. I begged him to change his mind, I cried until I was hoarse, and it didn’t change a thing. I was just left there with a soggy red face and a sore throat. The day after the break-up my mom and my friend Jamie did everything they could to cheer me up, and I thought I was going to be okay.

And then I saw him. That’s the trouble with dating someone from work-- if it doesn’t work out, you can’t avoid them. You still have to see them every day--still have to be reminded of the failure day after day after day. I wouldn’t let him see me cry, but the moment he was out the door, I was sobbing once more. I tried to make it stop. I knew it was unprofessional to be crying at work. I hated that I always cried. I fought it for two hours and still, I couldn’t force the tears to stop. They sent me home from work, because after all, who wants to eat an extra-salty pizza flavored with my tears. (Perhaps someone who’s a fan of anchovies...) But I couldn’t go home yet--I didn’t want my mom to know how upset I was. I had been keeping my depression a secret from her: she didn’t know about the cutting or the self-induced vomiting and it was definitely not the time to tell her that I wanted nothing more than to die a quiet painless death.

I headed to the back room of Round Table Pizza and waited. An hour passed, and still I cried. I wanted it to stop. I wanted my brain to stop--I wanted the tears to stop--I wanted the breath to stop. I dug in my bag for anything I could find. No razor. No sharp objects. Ah, a bottle of Advil, a bottle of antihistamines... It would have to do. I lined the pills up on the table so I could count. Fifty in all between the two. I’d never been good at swallowing and took them one at a time, like it was a ritual. When it was through, I felt like I needed more and grabbed ten single dosage packages of Aspirin from the first aid kit and swallowed them also. When I was finished, the tears were gone. My brain had started to feel doughy, as though my head had been stuffed with clay. I was calm when I called my parents to pick me up. When I got home, feeling dizzy, panic began to set in. I prayed my first really, non-formulaic prayer: “Oh God! Sh**! What did I do? I really wish I hadn’t done that. I really don’t want to die! My parents can’t handle this. Oh f***! God, I don’t want to die! Help me please!”

That night has been both the foundation of my faith and one of my biggest struggles for the last seven years. Every year on November 29th I have struggled with an enormous burden of guilt--I have been angry, depressed with myself over and over again every year. I have had to constantly forgive myself. But I am writing this mostly just to praise God today, because on my way home from work today I realized that this year I had felt none of that. November 29th passed without event--I felt no guilt, no self-hatred, no depression and had no thoughts of this event at all. I praise God that I have been healed enough that November 29th can go back to being just another day instead of a day filled with dread and regret. I praise God that I can now even survive real love being unreturned because no man is the center of my universe--I am glad that only God can have that place.