There Is Only Drowning or Swimming

my calculated launch into adulthood

After many long years spent putting my legs up the wall of my teenage bedroom and hoping the blood would rush to my head and out of my ears, eventually killing me, I found myself at college wanting to die just as much if not more than all the years before. It was as though I had been digging through a big bucket of beach trash in search of a locket, and after all the sifting was done I discovered that I was left only with impeccably organized litter — candy bar wrappers folded into eighths, sorted by color. I had started a new birth control a week before, but was too feminist at the time to consider that it may have been making me totally fucking insane.

“I have to get out of here, I have to leave,” I heaved over the phone to my father under the brutalist structure of the student’s union.

“Hmm… okay. Okay, well…” his familiar tone came through, responding as though I’d asked him for a decent substitute for tomato paste and not just suggested that I come crawling back to the place I’d been kicking and screaming to get out of only days ago. “We’ve already paid our part of the tuition. I think it’s non-refundable after… well, let me check.”

The rain came down hard around me, which I would normally find apt and comforting, but felt like an omen on that day. I didn’t think he was checking.

“I need to come home, like, this weekend. I can’t be here anymore.”

“I hear you.” I heard him sigh. “Can you just find…maybe just one thing. Find one thing this weekend that you can look forward to next week? Maybe you’ll start feeling better.” His tone was lifting, which meant he wanted to get off the phone. I lifted mine in response.

“Yeah, okay. I’ll find one thing.” My lip started quivering again. “Um… okay. I guess I’ll go now.” I went.

I went to Alexandria, Virginia to meet up with someone I sort of knew from high school. I cried the whole way there on the metro, furrowing my brow at myself through the glare of the window as the city passed me by. I was not a Cry In Public person. Despite being raised by a devout Atheist, I had a sort of Catholic inclination against inviting other people to observe my personal obscenities. I absorbed quaint wisdom from YouTube motivational speakers, and mostly cried as a means of release so that I could get on with everything else.

In Alexandria I bought a sweater that smelled like mothballs and stuffed its fibers into my nose that night in my Twin XL, hoping to be reminded of my grandmother. But my grandmother’s house smells like Glade plug-ins and antiseptic, so I was instead reminded of someone else’s grandmother — a nondescript, Platonic Someone — which only sent me further into misery as I felt myself a nondescript, Platonic No One.

Two years earlier, a brash realization had arrived to me that my childhood was over, had in fact been over for several years. The things that happened to me as a child could have happened to me as an adult and left me almost unscathed. The things that happened to me as a child later would happen to me as an adult, and when they did I felt mostly competent and needed only a day or two after the fact to lay in bed as though pressed flat by a semi-truck. The fact of being a child results in a powerlessness beyond measure. Knowing that I was awake to the horrors of life and yet without recourse to respond as I wished was a prison. Becoming an adult, I thought, was surely the way to freedom.

I met with my high school guidance counselor and informed him that I’d like to collapse my remaining two years of school into one. He informed me that he wasn’t sure this was possible. I thought about threatening to kill myself in front of him but decided to negotiate instead.

My third and final year of high school, I took a double load of classes in order to meet the remaining requirements. I did a cursory Google of ADHD symptoms, and the fact that I was pleasantly surprised to identify with most of them was ultimately irrelevant to the fact that I was determined to get the drugs anyway.

After a brief meeting with my pediatrician, I began taking 30mg of Extended Release Ritalin — a dose that only became more potent as my rabid anorexia aggrieved itself. Every morning, I woke up at 5 to finish the homework from the night before. I would usually sleep through or skip my first few periods of the day, but I never missed either of my English classes, which were my favorites. My AP Literature teacher was shocked to discover, through the administration who was forming a steady case against me, that I had a truancy problem. During the lunch break I retreated to my 2001 Pontiac to take furious pulls from a dab pen in that probably imbedded forever chemicals into my breasts and uterus. After school, I worked my retail job or directed a play with the local theater company or fucked my boyfriend, depending on the season. When the Release had fully Extended itself, usually around sundown, I would obliterate my brain with bong rips until Calculus kind of made sense and I couldn’t form sentences well enough to make the one that said I Want To Fucking Kill Myself.

I rinsed and repeated for a year, and eventually walked across the stage at graduation weighing 103 pounds. I can’t remember if I was actually awarded Valedictorian or if I was just allowed to sit on the stage because I was selected to write the graduation poem. I was rejected by Columbia and didn’t start listening to “Campus” by Vampire Weekend again until last year. I had committed myself to the George Washington University because I thought maybe I’d become a lawyer, and chiefly because the university had awarded me a merit scholarship that covered nearly all of my tuition costs.

So it was with great confusion and anger that I found myself shackled to my own inexplicable grief for the first few weeks of my supposed freedom. I had summited the mountain and looked around to discover that I was all alone up there, and the only way off my pedestal was to start a journey back down the other side. I wanted no more journeys. I wanted to arrive.

But I quickly learned that there is no arrival, there is only death or movement. There is no standing in water, there is only drowning or swimming.