My brain immediately goes to the most morbid, horrifying way that it could’ve played out, and repeats that scene. I’m obviously stuck at some point and I need to move past it.
One interesting thing I found out is that when people were expressing sympathy to me—I get all these e-mails and stuff, messages, and phone calls from people, being like, “I’m so sorry that this happened.” I noticed myself feeling almost guilty, like I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve your pity. I don’t deserve this. I looked back at my sister and my relationship. We weren’t especially close growing up. I mean, we had resolved our differences pretty much, at this point, but from an outside perspective, I felt like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be as sad as I’m feeling because we were a little bit distant.” I was feeling all this genuine grief but I wouldn’t let myself experience it because it was like, “You don’t deserve to feel that. You weren’t close enough to her to feel that,” so I didn’t let myself go with it. I was just stuck until I could talk it out and realize that that’s what’s happening, like, “No, I really am feeling these things. I really did love her.” That was one of the interesting things that happened. I didn’t expect myself to react that way.
I couldn’t cry actually. I didn’t cry until maybe two weeks after it had happened. I was so depressed and so emotionally dead inside that I couldn’t. It was really frustrating to me because I saw myself not crying. I felt awful inside. For not crying. I said, “This is not a normal—this is what a psychopath would be like if they were having this experience.”
Finally, at the funeral, I was able to cry and it felt really good to have it come out. It came out all at once. It just hit me like—I was going to say, “like a train,” but that’s inappropriate.
When you’re really depressed, you don’t feel like you can take anything beyond the particular brand of misery that you’re already experiencing, and 2013 was just sort of a fuck of a year for me. I also had a personal cancer scare, major surgery. Just a ton of stuff happened. I got in this almost victim mind-set of “I’m experiencing this horrible thing and then everything is happening on top of it. That shouldn’t happen. That’s not fair,” but there’s no universal justice system, right? There’s nothing governing whether that can happen or not.
Marc
Do you want me to confirm?
Allie
Yeah, sure.
Marc
No, there is no universal system. You’re just another person.
Allie
Yeah, just another person, so there’s nothing like, “Oh, well clearly you’ve had it pretty hard, so we’re going to go easy on you for a little while.” There’s none of that.
Looking back, it’s like, “Wow! I’m pretty resilient.” If I can make it through all that and still—it makes me a little bit less anxious and scared about the future because I’ve seen like, “Okay, I can make it through this cluster-fuck of a year.”
It was horrible, but I know that I can get through it. Now that I’m experiencing this reprieve of relative normalcy, it’s a good thing to have, because I can see that I’ve made it through that horrible stretch to this little island of safety where I am now.
I go through this cycle roughly every two to four years where I look back at myself from two or four years ago, and it’s just, “Oh my God! What was I doing?” I’m so ashamed of that person from years ago. I live with this constant suspicion that I’m going to feel that way looking back at now, in two years, four years from now. Maybe that’s one reason why I don’t want to be wrong. I don’t want to be like, “Oh, I did a good job,” and then be wrong in four years. I want to be like, “Oh, I called it. I called it.” I’m not saying it’s logical. It’s not.
Marc
It’s anxiety. It’s dread.
It’s fear of judgment.
It’s fear of not being cool.
It’s all that stuff that you grew up with.
You don’t want to all of a sudden feel happy and then be told—by who, I don’t know—that you were wrong.
Allie
It’s like a preemptive defense mechanism.
Marc
But don’t you think—through your writing—that there is some self-acceptance now?
Allie
Yeah, oh there definitely is some degree of it. I feel more comfortable with myself. I feel like I have ironed out a little bit more of who I am. I’m definitely not there yet, but I know I feel more comfortable being in my head.
TODD HANSON
In January 2009, I had no intention of ever coming out of the hotel I checked into. It was what the doctors call an intent to die suicide attempt as opposed to a cry for help, cry for attention, whatever. You don’t want anyone to stop you from pulling it off.
I didn’t want anyone to find me, I lived with my roommate at the time, one of my dearest friends. I didn’t want him to deal with it. I figured, in an anonymous hotel, a maid comes in, freaks out for two seconds, they call the paramedics or the cops, whoever deals with it, and that’s it. I left a note for the cops.
It was a day that wasn’t so much a day as it was years and years and I’ve been sad my whole life and I’d had enough. I brought my pajamas and a robe for some reason, I don’t know why, and I brought a pad of paper and a pen and a canister of pills and a bottle of scotch whiskey. Because I had read that you need another central nervous system depressant like alcohol to ensure that the pills work. I took sixty pills. I read on the Internet that six combined with being drunk would be enough, so I took sixty. Maybe I’m the first person to point out that he discovered a factual error on the Internet, but apparently that information wasn’t correct or maybe nobody really knows. I talked to the doctors and they were like, “We don’t know why it didn’t work.”
I’m not an alcoholic, I’m not even a big drinker. I’m not one of those people that responds much to alcohol. I drank the booze rather methodically out of a tall water glass. It took two and a half tall water glasses to finish the bottle and it was really weird; I was drinking it like water and it was just going down. It was weird my body did not reject the alcohol. Even though normally I can’t have more than three drinks without being sick. I drank half the bottle and then I took the entire mouthful of pills and then I drank the other half of the bottle and laid down and went to sleep.