For Those of us Who Didn't Think We'd Make it This Far

A Story by mercurymuse

an anecdotal message of my highschool years, written days before I venture to college for the first time, a cautionary tale of the temptations of our teenage years, and the lessons they teach us.

In two days, logistically in less than 48 hours, I will be getting in the driver’s seat of the car my parents bought me for my sixteenth birthday and driving to college for the first time. My new school is only a little over two hours away from my home that I grew up in, the house where I had birthday parties, celebrated Christmas, fought countless times with my parents, where I tripped on acid the summer my parents were never home, the house where I could never keep secrets- if you can’t tell by now, my home is where I have grown the most. My home was a place where I could lock the door to my bedroom and talk to myself, cry, smoke pot (sorry mom), and spend hours trying to figure out what the f**k I was doing with my life. My relationship with my parents has never been an easy one, mostly credited to my rebellions in the form of doing what I assumed all teenage girls do. See, from a very young age I knew that life was so short, one of my earliest memories was my dad with knees bent, in front of my grandfather’s grave. I remember this experience so vividly, because I think it’s the only time I’ve ever seen my father cry or express any emotion other than contempt. I’ve seen my parents fight so many times over money, and lost love in their marriage. So, I knew, based on what I grew up around, that I needed to do more than just scrape by this world waiting to die. The first experience I had in which I felt this way was in the eighth grade, I had just been expelled from a private Christian school and was hanging out with a new friend from my new public school. The night we hung out we slept in a shed in her backyard, we drank vodka mixed with sparkling pink lemonade, smoked a very loosely rolled joint, and our friendly neighborhood drug dealer decided this would be a good time to develop feelings for me. This night opened my eyes because, with a little rebellion, you could laugh, feel alive, fall in love. Really and truly, that night is probably one of the reasons my life is such a messy series of events. I continued sneaking out of friends’ houses to buy and smoke weed, I drank until I was puking on my own bare feet more times than I can recount, and kissed boys and girls I would be a lot better off not. My freshman year of high school, I met a girl who would become my best friend. The first time I spent the night at her house, she warned me about her parents, who both drank quite a bit more than my parents ever did. We would walk from her house to McDonalds and 711 for innocent snacks and drinks. I would jog beside her as she skateboarded through the streets of her neighborhood and across a busy road where we would browse the thrift store racks, and often steal packs of corcidin cough, cold, and congestion from the grocery store. We would smoke weed with her dad, drink Smirnoff vodka with her mom, purposefully overdose on cold medicine so we could trip, and sneak out to smoke and make out with her ex-boyfriend who lived in the same neighborhood. My freshman year of high school showed me a different side of adulthood, one where you didn’t go to bed at 8 pm after fighting with your spouse, after working at a job you hated, which is what I’ve seen my parents do almost every night growing up. In this case, you could just get fucked up with your daughter and her 14-year-old friends and forget the fact that the world can be a really dark, s****y place to be. Through high school, I got into a cycle of feeling f*****g hopelessly depressed for days until the weekend, where I could say bye to my parents, and get wasted and stoned at my best friend’s house, stay up all night, and fill my head with Radiohead and Odd Future tracks until it was time to clean my face with a makeup wipe and get picked back up by my mom, riding in the silent car each time smiling to myself, reliving the events of the night before that would stay with me until my parents decided to snoop through my room, read my diary, and all would be revealed. The first time my parents read my diary, they skimmed past the pages with my literal blood on them where I begged to die, and questioned why I was even alive, and punished me for the pages they did read, where I confessed my sins to myself, as memories that I would read over when I was feeling like I had nothing to live for. See, for basically all four years of high school I struggled with self-harm, anxiety, and depressive episodes that translated into controlled substance fueled benders that would last weeks. My drug and alcohol abuse probably did have something to do with my mental health, but in my mind, I was born to f**k around on the weekends and do drugs, I did not feel fit to go to class and eventually enroll in a college. I honestly thought I would either die, kill myself, or be addicted to drugs by the time I was 18, so I didn’t think too much about my future, I didn’t expect to even live that long, more or less be a functioning member of society. My parents were focused on my older siblings succeeding in college, so I basically existed under the radar for the most part and kept a lot of secrets. Eventually, I drifted from my best friend and her wonderfully fucked parents and gained a reputation as a party girl in the summer after my junior year. My first time getting drunk with older boys I didn’t really know was my sophomore year, but that’s a whole other article. It escalated to the summer after my junior year, when I started hanging out with the kids who partied. I partied basically every night that summer, and worked as a lifeguard during the day, so I was rarely home. Fourth of July weekend, 2017 became a haunted, very dark memory that I look back on with so much sadness for my younger self. I wish every day that I could step back in time and gather this broken girl in my arms and remind her of her worth, that she is young, that she is worth putting up a fight for. This cursed weekend was my first sexual experience, of course I had made out with guys and been felt up but this weekend, I was involved in the most traumatic experience of my lifetime thus far. To have your body abused, your wholeness stolen from you in a fit of lust is something that I will never forget, something that I will warn my sons and daughters about years from now. After this wicked, dark weekend, I continued to party, to drink until I puked onto my friends’ shoes, to smoke every day until I was basically out of order, and I decided to buy acid from a boy that liked the way I looked. My parents were out of town, and a friend and I dropped the acid and then freaked the f**k out on our cool friends until we scared them off. I cried so hard, releasing all the sadness I hid from the outside world, I physically pushed the boys out of my house, scared they would touch me, I tore through my skin with my nails until I drew blood, and I lay in my parents’ bed, wishing I had someone to talk to. I wished I had someone who believed me, who listened when I told them I’m not supposed to be a senior in high school, I’m supposed to be buried 6 feet in the ground right now, I was born to be a memory, I was born to die before I could be remembered as a failure. Weeks after we had our bad trip, school had been in session, and the bullying at school started. Now instead of being party girls, we were druggies, and we lived up to the name. to become numb to the insults and the coldness, two friends and I used the winter of 2017/18 as the scenery for a Xanax addiction. We took the pills at school, at home, on nights away from home, basically anywhere and anytime, you could count on me to be tapped out on prescription pills. The three of us got jobs hostessing at a local restaurant and spent our tips on nicotine and Xanax. Soon, we made a new friend group, recognized as literally “the crackheads”, composed of two openly gay teenage boys, and 4 girls with nicotine addictions. I continued with the self-harm through my senior year, often waking up with cuts and burns I had no memory of doing to myself. Within weeks, my parents discovered another journal in which I detailed my sexual encounter that dark weekend in July. I was punished for it for months, the self-harm escalated, and I continued telling myself that I shouldn’t be alive. My own dad screamed in my face “I’m gonna make you marry him”, as if I even f*****g knew who put his dirty f*****g hands on me. It had been months since I had been to a college party, or even looked twice at a boy, so when my suspension was lifted by my parents, I started drinking again, but only with my girlfriends, I also indulged in the occasional smoke session, but since my days of sobbing on bathrooms floors of unfamiliar houses, I have calmed down significantly. Now, I’m 19 years old, shorter hair, new laptop, better wardrobe, and I leave in two days, yes two days, for college. I really don’t know how these next four years are going to play out, I don’t know if I’m going to get stuck in the same cycle of abuse I did in high school, I don’t know if I’m going to flunk out or succeed, but I do know that by some miracle, I am alive. I am somehow still here, and I’ve been given a fresh start, a second chance at my life, my reputation, and my education. I’ve mostly mended my relationship with my mom, and my siblings; my relationship with my dad is still a struggle but I have a feeling it will get better as time passes. The things I’ve done don’t even feel like memories, they seem like dreams from a past life. And honestly, I’m glad I can look back on my past from the outside, I associate white skies with white pills, pot with my eighth-grade best friends treehouse, alcohol with caution, and boys with the knowledge that they don’t always care about the scars they leave us with. I essentially grew up alone, my parents really didn’t know me for years, I looked after myself for the formative years of young adulthood, and I’m proud of who I am. I’m proud of the strength I have mustered up to even sit and write about my past, I’m proud to have experienced so many different angles of life. I can confidently say that I can comfortably settle down in the future, without the fear that I’m missing out on anything. I often feel that I have packed a whole life of experience into the four years that make up a high school education. I’m grateful to still be alive and well, although I don’t know what to expect, I know that within me is a fire that can’t be put out by drunk boys with one thing on their mind or a razor by my bathroom sink. The marks on my body are reminders of my strength, that I could endure so much self-hate, not my weakness that I even did it in the first place. I doubt that I’m the only person to feel this way, lost and stunned by the fact that I am so old, so grown up, and somehow still alive. Although I’m fearful, I’m going to try my damndest to approach these upcoming years with confidence, and the street smarts to avoid the dark, and the uber dangerous. So, two days from now, I won’t only be packing my dorm supplies, but I will have with me a mild nicotine addiction, years of baggage, a depression that has grown gentle with me, and most importantly, self-love, and the comfort of a second chance at life and all of its accessories.