Overdue

A thousand apologies for my absence. But the good news is, I'm alive. Ha.

I've been having some... blogger's block? It's more like serious depression that makes you think everything you do is stupid, even some meaningless little blog like only 10 people read. I know I reneged on my promise to write short entries more often, but when you feel like shit and kind of want to shoot yourself(again), the last thing you feel like doing is talk about how shitty your life is.

So there's that.

Whenever I get depressed over something, it's usually over something I can't do anything about. These days I've been depressed about my age, how old and soon-to-be-saggy I am becoming. I know, the stupidest thing to get depressed over, I know this. I recognize this. But my speciality is finding misery in even the most natural things, so it's age I've chosen this time around.

I know that probably in 10 or even in 5 years, I'll look back and think, Goddamn, why the fuck was I depressed when I was still relatively hot and still in my 20's? I've been trying to think of what Catherine in X years would tell Catherine at age 28 to do. She would probably tell her to stop being a whiny little bitch and to get her shit together. It worked for a day, but now I'm back to being depressed again.

But mostly I think it's because of my self-enforced celibacy that I've been doing. It's not even really celibacy as it is more... isolation from mankind, really. I go all day and sometimes 4 or 5 days without talking to anyone. Me, the approach-men-at-Hvd-bookstore-and-beg-them-to-fuck-me girl, I'm afraid to talk to men. Sometimes I'll catch one looking at me and I'll become vaguely ill, like a slight reflux thing that I get whenever I look at seafood(I hate seafood). I don't know what caused this, but I think the whole thing with Ben has somewhat traumatized me and--oh, yes--let's not forget that I tried to shoot my brains out not too long ago.

Speaking of which, I might as well get it over with and talk about how I did that. I've been putting it off because I felt so idiotic thinking about my FAILED attempt at offing myself, but it's kind of funny and the sheer dumbassery of it all is nothing if not amusing. So.

Anyway, where I last left off, I had come back from my dead brother's pad, where I found a gun underneath his bed and I FedExed it to myself. You know how some people prepare for hurricanes by stocking cans of food? Well, I knew that one day, possibly one day very soon, I'd be wanting a gun to use on myself. So many times I've said, "God, I wish I had a gun," and I never had access to one. I felt like a macabre kid on Christmas Eve, she of this shady gun that her druggie brother had persumably used once upon a time.

So I got back to Boston and my roomate had signed for the package for me. He was like, "WTF is in that? It's so damn heavy!" I didn't tell him, of course. I never told anyone.

Fast forward to May. I'm feeling like shit, like the world is collasping upon me, I'm such a victim of my self-hatred, blah blah. I drink half a bottle of Scotch, drunk dial the med student I met at the bookstore, feel dejected about everything. You think I'm sad when I'm sober, wait until you see me drunk. It's like Elliot Smith mixed with Edgar Allen Poe crossed with Emily Dickinson X 100. The med student was busy and said he couldn't see me, and that pushed me over the edge.

At this point, I started to get incredibly hopeless about everything. You know how dramatic I am, how I make everything out to be either a zero or a thousand. There is no in between, not ever. It spiraled into something drunk, black, and sinister, and I thought: Shit, I have a gun. I can finally do what I've only been thinking about doing all these years.

To understand what happened next, you must understand my experience with guns: I had none. I had never shot a gun, never cocked it, never aimed it. I could barely identify one. But being the drunken sad, idiotic D. Baggerson that I was, I decided that would not deter me. I promoptly found my gun, found the bullets, and proceeded to Google to learn how to load the bullets to properly kill myself.

The next thing I know, the gun is loaded. I stared at it for a while, crying my eyes out, wanting someone to stop me, maybe. But I didn't tell anyone, so of course, no one could. I then started to think a little through my Scotch-soaked brain: If I shoot myself, there will surely be a bloody mess. I don't want my roomate to be responsible for my bloody body/mess. I should do this in a way that will be least messy, as to spare my roomate the horror of cleaning it all up.

My moments of thoughtfulness manifest themselves in the oddest of moments.

So I took the gun and went into the bathroom. Checked my face in the mirror-- I remember thinking, God, I look so sloppy. Then I laughed a little to myself at how ridiculous I was being-- I was going to die, it didn't matter, duh. I turned off the lights, as I thought a proper death would go nicely with total lack of light. I climbed into the bathtub, tried to lie still, aimed the gun near my head. My reasoning for not aiming directly at my head was that I didn't want headbits to explode everywhere. I wanted a death Mr Clean would approve of. So I aimed near what I thought was my head, anyway. When I pulled the trigger, I heard a loud noise and then I felt nothing for what seemed like an eternity. This ether, this halfway point between death and life-- it was hell. I couldn't move.

Only minutes passed and I felt this throbbing pain and a dull pain in my arm. I had turned all the lights off in the bathroom so it was completely dark, but I felt something slimy and liquidy dripping on my body. Oh, and it was warm, like someone was dipping me in a warm bath. It took me only the next few seconds to realize that I was still alive. I failed.

By this point, I realized what a shitty shitty situation I've thrown myself into. If anyone found out, I knew that I would be locked up instantly. Perhaps what I fear most next to being fat is the thought of being locked up, losing my freedom, being locked up in a mental ward(which has actually happened to me once, but that's another story for another time). The pain in my arm became unbearable, but it was almost euphoric. I can't really describe it.

I couldn't get up from the bathtub, and I couldn't turn on the light. Then I heard my roomate yelling something, and I don't remember what happened next. He called an ambulance, they carried me on a stretcher, and I woke up en route to the hospital. The EMT was like, "What happened?" Immediately I knew I had to come up with something feasible rather than "I tried to kill myself," so I said, "I was playing with a gun and I shot myself by accident." I also saw, from the corner of my eye, what I had done: I shot myself in the upper arm. I missed my head. I now had what looked like a spurting, squirting blood fountain with an arm attached to it on my body. I promptly passed out again, and I woke up in the ER later with the doctor asking me how he could reach my parents.

This is how the facts of my life convinced the good folks at the ER that my shooting was "an accident":

1)I was a Hvd grad student
2)I had my preppiest clothes on-- Earl Jeans and a DVF top. Mind you, I was wearing heels during the entire process, until someone in the ambulance took them off for me. Vanity trails me everywhere, as you can clearly see.
3)My aim was bad, SO BAD, so unbelievably bad, that no one would have guessed I was aiming for my head. This is probably where being a drunken asshole saved me, because had I been sober, I most definitely would have aimed well enough to do something detrimental in the cephalization area. What would have actually happened is my wake up in the middle of the night with terror- kind of nightmare: I would have probably rendered maybe half of my brain useless, and I would be wearing a diaper and dictating this with one of those breathing/typing machines that quadrapelegic people use, in the manner of Stephen Hawking.
4)Again: I was drunk. What do drunk kids do when they get drunk? Apparently play with guns and get hurt. Believable enough for the ER doctors at the best hospital in America(Mass Gen).

What no one tells you when you're watching people do it all the time on TV and in the movies, is that shooting a gun is much, much harder than it looks. It's not point and shoot. There's backward momentum and Newton's third force action-reaction pair to reckon with. It is fucking hard. It takes coordination and kinesthetic awareness.

Anyway, that's enough typing for tonight. As a result of my suicide attempt, I should mention that I can't quite bend my elbow or contract my bicep without getting some sharp pains. They told me I had to start physical therapy, but guess what-- my school insurance doesn't really cover it, and I thought physical therapy was kind of for losers. I am wrong about the latter conclusion. I should look into getting some therapy, for both my arm and the contents of my head.

Will write more later. It's really aching.