CW: Suicidal ideation, self-harm

I discovered very early on in my life that I was what parenting books and psychologists called a “difficult” child. My mom did her best to hide the collection of books she had on the subject, but I was born nosy and with a flare for the dramatics so I always found a way to find out whatever it was someone didn’t want me to know. She also had a library of child-friendly versions of these books. One of the books I remember my mom reading me most was Harriet, You’ll Drive Me Wild! by Mem Fox. The story of a little girl named Harriet who “doesn’t mean to be pesky. Sometimes she just is. And her mother doesn't mean to lose her temper. Sometimes, she just does. But Harriet and her mother know that even when they do things they wish they hadn't, they still love each other very much”. My mom tried her best to understand my brain, but that has never been any easy task for anyone.  

I first experienced what I know now to be intrusive thoughts when I was five years old. My family went to church every Sunday, and as a very curious child, I listened intently to what my pastor and Sunday school teachers had to say. My five-year-old OCD-ridden brain came to understand religion as something that had to be done perfectly in order for me and everyone I love to remain safe in a world full of evil. My first intrusive images were my family and I being tortured and incinerated in hell. I lived in constant fear of the rapture. I would stay up for hours each night praying for each and every person I knew. If I messed up the prayer or forgot anyone, I would have to start over. I believed I was solely responsible for the deadly consequences that would come from an imperfect prayer. This was a ritual I repeated incessantly every night for years. 

When I was ten years old, my terminally ill grandmother moved into my family’s home. She had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer about 15 years earlier and although she was only fifty-five, her illness had progressed to a point where she could no longer care for herself. I was not a stranger to death at this point, my father’s cousin had been killed by a cop during a domestic violence dispute with her husband just a few years earlier, but this was different. I knew she was dying, and all I could do was watch her fade away. 

During this transitional period in my family’s life, I started to experience suicidal ideations. I couldn’t understand why life seemed so much harder to deal with for me than it did my friends. Everyday I was fighting my own brain, trying my best to ward off the intrusions with rituals and compulsions. I would lay in the field beside my house picking the petals off of flowers: “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes.” I was having a particularly hard time regulating my emotions in the fifth grade. After a big fight with my friends, I exploded at one of them on the playground,  calling one of them a bitch. This was an unthinkable act at the time. The girl told her mom, her mom called the teacher, and the next day I was being interrogated by a school administrator. I obviously didn’t have the words to explain the blackout rage I went into during the incident so I just sobbed in the office until they sent me to the guidance counselor. 

Everything feels like the end of the world when you’re little. All of the people in my friend group (justifiably) took the side of the girl I called a bitch and all the sudden I was sitting alone at lunch and on the playground. I had already been experiencing suicidal ideations for a while so I decided to take the flower petals’ word for it: “yes”. I didn’t know how, (because I was a little fucking kid) but I did know I wanted to die.  

So I did the only thing a ten-year-old could conceptualize, I tried to bust my head open on the bricks that made up my family’s home. After a few extremely embarrassing and unsuccessful attempts, I slid down the side of my house until I hit the ground and sat there holding my head and crying. I didn’t even draw any blood. I never spoke a word about it again until I started therapy at 20. The decade between 10 and 20 was filled with rage, grief, and mental illness. I was angry. I’m still angry. 

Three months after my 19th birthday, I was sent home from my freshman year of college for 2 weeks for some kind of virus going around. I spent those two weeks in blissful ignorance with my friends, waiting on an email with a return date from our colleges that would never come. 

As a long-time sufferer of existential anxiety, the pandemic did something very Bad to my brain. When I arrived at my childhood home, I had a nervous breakdown. Now it REALLY felt like the world was ending. By that point, I had abandoned any notion of faith. I no longer had that line of “protection” that came from my incessant rituals. Something flipped in my brain. I went from a lifetime of good grades to failing every single one of my classes. I was emotionally unhinged. I cried and fought with my parents constantly. 

Everyday, I woke up, smoked as much weed as physically possible, refused to open my laptop to do any schoolwork, and watched the cups in my room grow mold as I laid in my bed rotting away. After a couple months of living in an agonizing, drug-induced haze, I finally worked up the strength to drag myself to my kooky, heavy-on-the-prescription-pad, long-time doctor. I struggled to choke back my tears as I attempted to explain feelings I couldn’t even conceptualize to myself. I left with a prescription for Lexapro, which promptly resulted in my first medically-recorded manic episode.  

Emma Kate West is an essayist, poet, and feminist scholar from North Carolina. Her analysis of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, "Would You Be My Baby Tonight? A Feminist Theoretical Analysis of 'Lolita' and its Cultural Transcendence," was featured at the Women's, Gender, & Sexuality Studies South's 2023 conference. She publishes new literary content weekly on her Substack, Not Girl Concept (notgirlconcept.substack.com).