Longest Email I've Ever Written
To update a friend from Student Ambassadors who went with me to Europe the summer before 8th grade...
I've had a really hard life not so much since I got back but definitely since I started high school. In 8th grade (right after when we came back) I did really well, Nat'l Honors Society, Volleyball, Track, Advanced and Jazz bands, Counseling Center Aide, 4.0 gpa etc etc. Then high school came and at first everything was fine, different but ok. 2nd semester I met a boy (a year older) who was to become my best friend. Shortly after (as in later that month, April) that one of my friends died of mononucleosis (weird thing to die from but it got so bad his spleen ruptured inside of him and he died) and he was the first dead person I ever saw. I remember how scary it was when I first went to see him, his casket was lain out at the funeral home for a "viewing" which is really just the day before the funeral when people can go in and see the body. They do it a lot for kids or younger people because for the ones they leave behind, their death is harder to process and accept and seeing the dead body of their beloved right in front of them seems to do the trick. When I went to see him, it was between other viewers so it was just me and Jared. He was in a long room at one end and I entered from the end opposite to him so I had to walk, slowly, down to the other end towards the casket. It felt like some kind of horror movie, I was half scared he would pop out and grab me and half wishing he would, wishing he would spring up and say "JUST KIDDING!" but that never happened. Around this time I started to get really depressed and introverted. I have always loved to write and during this period (April-June) I went through 5 spiral bound 120 pg stenopads and wrote in my livejournal everyday. When I went to school I would sometimes go to class or I would sometimes hide in some obtuse corner or the bathroom to read or write. I lived in basically my own little world of grief, sorrow and literature. I began to get crazy. I felt I too would die in my youth so I tried to get as much life experience before that fateful day (I thought sometime when I was 19 it was bound to happen). I stopped caring about my grades, started doing drugs, defied my parents, defied the police, hung out with tons of dead end people and dangerous ones at that, began to hate myself and who I had become, and fell into a deep and dark depression which I aided and abetted by not taking care of myself and making bad choices.
The next year, my sophomore year, I got my license in September and for a while did really well in school. I was involved in drama and recieved an invitation to join the revered Honors Drama Troupe who were planning to attend a prestigious theater competion/festival in Scotland that summer. We did bi-monthly improv nights and like four smaller-scale productions. At the end of the year I was cast in the school's production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I was the Shrew, Katarina.
I was a sophomore at Sprague High School. Sprague is full of pretentious, clique-y rich kids, a bunch of smart exchange students, the gothic kids, band kids, athletes, brains + student governors, drug dealers, addicts and users, artists and other miscellaneous groups. but it was always groups, not singular people. I hated that.
In April, in the midst of rehearsals for the May Taming of the Shrew show, I got my license suspended for "pulling an illegal u-turn on a moped". I was riding this moped thing, went like 2 blocks from when I started and started to head back (I just wanted to see what it drove like). I turned it around on the side of a traffic-less street. Shortly thereafter lights were flashing and I got pulled over on that little moped. The officer was on some power trip and became frightfully upset that I didn't shiver at and bemoan his presence. I was brave and businesslike. I was also sober, that was a good thing. He managed to make up 3 different driver violations I had apparently committed and gave me a citation and court date. At court I figured the judge would toss out this ludicrous charge but instead fined me $600 dollars collectively for the 3 violations and sent me home. A week and a half later I got a letter from the DMV saying my license had been suspended for six months. I was devastated, driving is such an illicit freedom I cherish in my search for independence. I was very disheartened. Getting my license back 6 months later cost almost $200 dollars. It was ridiculous.
So around April I was ending a relationship with my boyfriend and first love. We had been together about 9 months and everything was wonderful (i still think we're bound to end up with one another someday) but I was going through a lot of emotional stress at the time and my therapist and parents determined we were too emotionally manipulative of each other and some thing I am ashamed of had taken place (on my part) in the relationship that tainted it's purity. It was incredibly painful to go through. My parents had recently gotten divorced and my mom moved into an apartment. My mom told my dad she wanted a divorce while we were on vacation with my best friend, my aunt, my uncle and my two cousins (and my parents). She had told me a couple months earlier she was going to do this (I had no idea she'd do it while we were vacationing in Mexico, however!) and I had to keep it a secret. It broke my heart.
So I split my time between my mom and dad and I was having horrible depression. A while after Cody and I broke up I began to see another boy named Kevin. He and I were dangerous together, we got into really hard drugs and I basically dropped out of school. Actually, my therapist wrote me a medical release note because I started having anxiety attacks at school and then would get scared to go. It was hard because I had to see my him everyday and all the friends he turned against me (they were like my brothers but they'd been friends with him for years longer than they had known me. and in all honesty, some of them remained loyal to me after all this). He told them not to talk to me because he was upset I didn't want to be his girlfriend after he raped me.
I was pulled from the registrar a day before the final show of Taming. The school was kind enough to let me finish the play even though technically I was no longer a student of Sprague. It was wise on their behalf anyway, I was the main character of the play after all.
So around June I hit bottom hard. My dad saw a huge bruise on my arm and asked what it was. I broke down, I was trapped. I told him what had been going on. Then I stopped using and broke up with Kevin and had Cody watch and care for me while I detoxed. My use had really gotten out of control. The week of my detox I had therapy for about 2 hours a day and was monitored closely (babysat really). I was forbidden to see Kevin.
My parents told my best friend's parents what she had been up to (she was using with Kevin and I as well as a couple of our other friends) and they sent her away to live with her aunt in Colorado. In her wake I also had to deal with a lot of people ignoring me on her wishes. Totally disheartening, my best friend was gone, I had to disown Kevin, and tons of people hated me because I was a "narc" (even though my mom was the one who told Rachel's mom).
In the fall I started at a new school called South Salem High School. It was more of an artistic school than Sprague and was much more laid back. Plus a ton of GOOD PEOPLE who I wanted to surround myself with were there. I decided to get really good grades and turn my life around here. I was getting straight A's.
I played racquetball at South. I had played for 2 years at Sprauge and made it to Nationals where I won the gold medal in mixed doubles with my partner and good friend DJ. It was horribly exciting and i love racquetball. Anyway, I was playing racquetball for south then. I'm pretty athletic, I rode horses competitively and did gymnastics for 10 years (I started when I was 4 and 5), volleyball, track (high jump, race walking, hurdles), cross country, basketball, aqua jogging every sunday etc etc. Sports are a good outlet for me. So that was a good thing.
Then in October I was visiting a friend and they had to rush into work unexpectedly, leaving me to find my own way home. I figured I could easily walk, it would take about 40 minutes but I could make it. However, it began to pour, hard. I was dripping wet in about 3 minutes. I tried calling everyone I could think of to rescue me from the downpour. Everyone was busy. As a last resort I called Kevin, whom I hadn't seen in a while and wasn't seeing on a regular basis since that June. He picked me up gladly, we were still friends despite what had happened. My mom called (my parents had forbidden me to see him) and asked me what I was doing. Instead of lying to cover the fact I was with Kevin, I just told her what had happened.
She was infuriated and said she was going to pick me up. As a 17 year old, I felt sick at the prospect of being babied so. So Kevin and I went into hiding. Haha, sort of. We just went to his house which was a ways from where I live. I knew that I wasn't going to make the wrong choices and Kevin wasn't using anyways so I thought it was fine. I was just trying to establish my adulthood. Also, I'm incredibly stubborn.
My mom and dad told me to come home and I refused. I went downtown for a show at the coffee house. My mom figured out where I was and came down, demanding I give her my key. I obliged. She then took me home so I could pack a bag of stuff so I wouldn't be completely unarmed against the cold hard streets. I stayed out for two days before she begged me to come home, apologizing profusely.
The day after I came home was a school day. I went but had trouble paying attention. My first period class was Algebra 2. I took all the notes and wrote down the homework assignment and then asked the teacher if I could leave, as I didn't feel well. He noticed something was wrong with me and told me I needed to talk to my counselor before I went home.
My counselor is one of those fake-happy plastic people. That annoys me beyond belief. I told her about my family and what was going on and she just made patronizing comments like, "Oh, your family is so horrible, you must feel terrible, do you ever want to kill yourself?" I'm a little pain in the ass sometimes so I said "Sure, who doesn't??" She asked me if I had though of how to do it yet. I said, "It so easy to make a plan, for instance, right now i could jump out your window and run out infront of all that traffic there. See? Easy."
She didn't like that.
She called my parents.
They came down to her office.
They said they wanted to help me.
It had gone on for too long.
They were taking me to the hospital.
I freaked out. I was jumping on her desk and the chairs, screaming at the top of my lungs, cussing out my stupid counselor etc etc. They wrestled me into the car and we were off.
In the emergency room the nurses injected a heavy dose of Ativan into my butt cheek and I passed out. I dont remember very much of that day/night, I guess I got a total of three ativans shots because I kept waking up and freaking out every few hours.
I woke up conciously in the back of a van with a metal grate separating the front and back halves, covered in a thin hospital blanket. The two people in the front of the van were in uniforms and I didn't recognize them.
I was headed to the psych ward of Providence Hospital in Portland. My parents were meeting us there, they told me.
So there I was, in the security room at the psych ward for adolescents. Two cameras, bricks over the window so you can't see out, a hard wooden bed and locks on the bathroom and main doors. After the first day I was moved to my own room. The ward was on the 6th floor and from the window seat in my room I had a lovely view of the parkade and the stream of ant-like people entering and exiting. I felt like a bird up there, in a huge steel and mortar cage.
After about a week (after they found out about how big of a druggie I was) they sent me to residential rehab in Gladstone. That was absolute hell. Since I was a respectful and non-violent type of lady I got completely overlooked by the staff because they were constantly busy dealing with the constant stream of fist fights, cat fights, breakdowns and generally destructive behavior coming from my peers. I felt like such an outcast. I did not belong except for that I did drugs, otherwise I was completely a misfit.
After I got out of there I had virtually no life, my parents were so protective of me. However, I was finally happy. Being all alone in that security room in the psych ward and having to fend for myself and keep myself company at rehab, I found that in myself I have one true friend. No matter what I've managed to get into, I'm always there for myself. Thankfully I realized that I am a good person and I deserve a lot more credit than I had been giving myself.
So in many ways I am very thankful I went to those places. It seemed rather horrible at the time, though.
When I got back to South my grades had fallen (I was gone about a month) and I had massive amounts of catch up work to complete. VERY overwhelming especially since early in the year I was so dedicated to doing well and really gave a lot of effort towards getting good grades only to lose them while I was further improving myself.
I got my license back about 1 month after I got out of rehab and that was such a wonderful sense of freedom for me. My friend Allie made me about 10 really great mix tapes (I dont have a CD player in there) and I would listen to them. Regularly I drove to the coast or deep within the unexplored (by me) countryside and all around the cities in Salem's general vicinity. I began to go on vision quests where I would follow the sun rising, drive into the sunrise, and mediate. Usually before I drove under the sunrise I was feeling centered and renewed. I formed my own religion having to do with the sunrise and sunset which comforted me because I could never find spiritual solace in any sort of Christianity that had been pressed upon me in the past.
Unfortunately, on my way to Eugene to visit a friend I was pulled over for speeding. I was going with the flow of traffic but I was pulling up the rear so I got the ticket. And my license got suspended again. Because it was in Eugene we had to pay the Lane Cty. Courthouse not the Marion Cty. (Salem's) and generally when you recieve a ticket your license will be revoked if you fail to pay the fine on time. We did, but Lane County neglected to inform the Oregon DMV (we DID pay close to the deadline, but still on time) and they revoked my license. We tried talking to a bunch of different people to try and explain the mistake but we got the same answer everywhere, "You're just going to have to wait it out.. sorry!"
God. :(
So I have to wait until September 12th to get my license back. That is the day after my 18th birthday and the day I can get my license back. I COULD have done it on my birthday but it's on a Sunday this year so again, I just have to wait.
I have pretty much gotten my act together by now. I have two part-time jobs and just got interviewed for a third. I'm a barista at the Blue Pepper Internet Cafe which is also an art gallery and custom framing shop. I work there three to five times a week. My other job is Head Groom (very prestigious... I get to boss around 2 twelve year olds that help at the stables and make them do stuff I don't want to do, like clean the bathroom [no groom should ever be forced to clean toilets.]} at Jory Hill Stables. Ironically, that's the stables I rode at my first time ever when I was almost 5 years old. Stranger still, the same horse I had my first ride on is STILL THERE and a couple weeks ago I taught a young girl how to ride on her. Very touching. So as a groom I get the horses ready for the trainer and put them away after they're worked, I do all clipping and bathing, I exercise horses sometimes and I go to all the shows and feed, braid and groom. I also am basically an apprentice to the trainer. In a few years I can probably manage the barn.
However, I'm going to have to take a break from working there until I get my license back. Last Sunday my mom tried to kill herself and was sent to the psych ward in Salem. I was able to bring her home on Friday afternoon but she is the one who gives me rides all the way out to the stable every few times a week and it's just too stressful, especially on days when she has to be at work herself. So I'm going to call it quits until I can transport myself. This makes me somewhat sad but I'll manage.
You're probably freaking out and reading that last paragraph again right now. Yeah, my mom's suicide attempt was really scary I was at the Blue Pepper when it happened and thank god she decided to try and die by the Willamette River because the Willamette River flows through Riverfront Park which is about 3 blocks from my work downtown at the Blue Pepper. Her friend called me and said I needed to get ahold of her right away, she'd said goodbye to her parents and to him and to a few other and told him to say goodbye to me for her. She'd taken all the pills in the house, drank 2 bottles of wine, slashed her wrists, arms and ankles and driven to the park. I called her right away and she answered. She was crying and I could barely understand her but she said she was at the river and mentioned fireworks but said she had to go, said goodbye and hung up. I went to the spot where we had seen them last month on the 4th. She wasn't there so I asked some people sitting on a bench if they'd seen anyone matching her description and they pointed me North. I was already on the phone with 911 at this point. Joe a friend who happened to be at my work visiting me when this all happened, ran to the park with me and saw her sitting under an abandoned bridge . Right as I was about to go look at her, the firetruck and ambulance came, then five cop cars. They told me to stay back. They shot her with tranquilizers out of a gun that looked like a sniper rifle and fished her out from the riverbank. I rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital and stayed there for a really long time, just watching her sleep it off.
The next day she got moved to the psych ward. It's really strange, I haven't even cried at all. The whole time of crisis I kept my head and tended to business. I stayed in the apartment we share alone while she was away. I did the shopping, laundry and cleaning. I'm like a little adult.
Someday soon I'm sure it's all going to hit me and then I'm probably going to have to cry.
On the other hand, my 18th birthday is only 27 days away and I'm wildly excited!
I've had a really hard life not so much since I got back but definitely since I started high school. In 8th grade (right after when we came back) I did really well, Nat'l Honors Society, Volleyball, Track, Advanced and Jazz bands, Counseling Center Aide, 4.0 gpa etc etc. Then high school came and at first everything was fine, different but ok. 2nd semester I met a boy (a year older) who was to become my best friend. Shortly after (as in later that month, April) that one of my friends died of mononucleosis (weird thing to die from but it got so bad his spleen ruptured inside of him and he died) and he was the first dead person I ever saw. I remember how scary it was when I first went to see him, his casket was lain out at the funeral home for a "viewing" which is really just the day before the funeral when people can go in and see the body. They do it a lot for kids or younger people because for the ones they leave behind, their death is harder to process and accept and seeing the dead body of their beloved right in front of them seems to do the trick. When I went to see him, it was between other viewers so it was just me and Jared. He was in a long room at one end and I entered from the end opposite to him so I had to walk, slowly, down to the other end towards the casket. It felt like some kind of horror movie, I was half scared he would pop out and grab me and half wishing he would, wishing he would spring up and say "JUST KIDDING!" but that never happened. Around this time I started to get really depressed and introverted. I have always loved to write and during this period (April-June) I went through 5 spiral bound 120 pg stenopads and wrote in my livejournal everyday. When I went to school I would sometimes go to class or I would sometimes hide in some obtuse corner or the bathroom to read or write. I lived in basically my own little world of grief, sorrow and literature. I began to get crazy. I felt I too would die in my youth so I tried to get as much life experience before that fateful day (I thought sometime when I was 19 it was bound to happen). I stopped caring about my grades, started doing drugs, defied my parents, defied the police, hung out with tons of dead end people and dangerous ones at that, began to hate myself and who I had become, and fell into a deep and dark depression which I aided and abetted by not taking care of myself and making bad choices.
The next year, my sophomore year, I got my license in September and for a while did really well in school. I was involved in drama and recieved an invitation to join the revered Honors Drama Troupe who were planning to attend a prestigious theater competion/festival in Scotland that summer. We did bi-monthly improv nights and like four smaller-scale productions. At the end of the year I was cast in the school's production of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. I was the Shrew, Katarina.
I was a sophomore at Sprague High School. Sprague is full of pretentious, clique-y rich kids, a bunch of smart exchange students, the gothic kids, band kids, athletes, brains + student governors, drug dealers, addicts and users, artists and other miscellaneous groups. but it was always groups, not singular people. I hated that.
In April, in the midst of rehearsals for the May Taming of the Shrew show, I got my license suspended for "pulling an illegal u-turn on a moped". I was riding this moped thing, went like 2 blocks from when I started and started to head back (I just wanted to see what it drove like). I turned it around on the side of a traffic-less street. Shortly thereafter lights were flashing and I got pulled over on that little moped. The officer was on some power trip and became frightfully upset that I didn't shiver at and bemoan his presence. I was brave and businesslike. I was also sober, that was a good thing. He managed to make up 3 different driver violations I had apparently committed and gave me a citation and court date. At court I figured the judge would toss out this ludicrous charge but instead fined me $600 dollars collectively for the 3 violations and sent me home. A week and a half later I got a letter from the DMV saying my license had been suspended for six months. I was devastated, driving is such an illicit freedom I cherish in my search for independence. I was very disheartened. Getting my license back 6 months later cost almost $200 dollars. It was ridiculous.
So around April I was ending a relationship with my boyfriend and first love. We had been together about 9 months and everything was wonderful (i still think we're bound to end up with one another someday) but I was going through a lot of emotional stress at the time and my therapist and parents determined we were too emotionally manipulative of each other and some thing I am ashamed of had taken place (on my part) in the relationship that tainted it's purity. It was incredibly painful to go through. My parents had recently gotten divorced and my mom moved into an apartment. My mom told my dad she wanted a divorce while we were on vacation with my best friend, my aunt, my uncle and my two cousins (and my parents). She had told me a couple months earlier she was going to do this (I had no idea she'd do it while we were vacationing in Mexico, however!) and I had to keep it a secret. It broke my heart.
So I split my time between my mom and dad and I was having horrible depression. A while after Cody and I broke up I began to see another boy named Kevin. He and I were dangerous together, we got into really hard drugs and I basically dropped out of school. Actually, my therapist wrote me a medical release note because I started having anxiety attacks at school and then would get scared to go. It was hard because I had to see my him everyday and all the friends he turned against me (they were like my brothers but they'd been friends with him for years longer than they had known me. and in all honesty, some of them remained loyal to me after all this). He told them not to talk to me because he was upset I didn't want to be his girlfriend after he raped me.
I was pulled from the registrar a day before the final show of Taming. The school was kind enough to let me finish the play even though technically I was no longer a student of Sprague. It was wise on their behalf anyway, I was the main character of the play after all.
So around June I hit bottom hard. My dad saw a huge bruise on my arm and asked what it was. I broke down, I was trapped. I told him what had been going on. Then I stopped using and broke up with Kevin and had Cody watch and care for me while I detoxed. My use had really gotten out of control. The week of my detox I had therapy for about 2 hours a day and was monitored closely (babysat really). I was forbidden to see Kevin.
My parents told my best friend's parents what she had been up to (she was using with Kevin and I as well as a couple of our other friends) and they sent her away to live with her aunt in Colorado. In her wake I also had to deal with a lot of people ignoring me on her wishes. Totally disheartening, my best friend was gone, I had to disown Kevin, and tons of people hated me because I was a "narc" (even though my mom was the one who told Rachel's mom).
In the fall I started at a new school called South Salem High School. It was more of an artistic school than Sprague and was much more laid back. Plus a ton of GOOD PEOPLE who I wanted to surround myself with were there. I decided to get really good grades and turn my life around here. I was getting straight A's.
I played racquetball at South. I had played for 2 years at Sprauge and made it to Nationals where I won the gold medal in mixed doubles with my partner and good friend DJ. It was horribly exciting and i love racquetball. Anyway, I was playing racquetball for south then. I'm pretty athletic, I rode horses competitively and did gymnastics for 10 years (I started when I was 4 and 5), volleyball, track (high jump, race walking, hurdles), cross country, basketball, aqua jogging every sunday etc etc. Sports are a good outlet for me. So that was a good thing.
Then in October I was visiting a friend and they had to rush into work unexpectedly, leaving me to find my own way home. I figured I could easily walk, it would take about 40 minutes but I could make it. However, it began to pour, hard. I was dripping wet in about 3 minutes. I tried calling everyone I could think of to rescue me from the downpour. Everyone was busy. As a last resort I called Kevin, whom I hadn't seen in a while and wasn't seeing on a regular basis since that June. He picked me up gladly, we were still friends despite what had happened. My mom called (my parents had forbidden me to see him) and asked me what I was doing. Instead of lying to cover the fact I was with Kevin, I just told her what had happened.
She was infuriated and said she was going to pick me up. As a 17 year old, I felt sick at the prospect of being babied so. So Kevin and I went into hiding. Haha, sort of. We just went to his house which was a ways from where I live. I knew that I wasn't going to make the wrong choices and Kevin wasn't using anyways so I thought it was fine. I was just trying to establish my adulthood. Also, I'm incredibly stubborn.
My mom and dad told me to come home and I refused. I went downtown for a show at the coffee house. My mom figured out where I was and came down, demanding I give her my key. I obliged. She then took me home so I could pack a bag of stuff so I wouldn't be completely unarmed against the cold hard streets. I stayed out for two days before she begged me to come home, apologizing profusely.
The day after I came home was a school day. I went but had trouble paying attention. My first period class was Algebra 2. I took all the notes and wrote down the homework assignment and then asked the teacher if I could leave, as I didn't feel well. He noticed something was wrong with me and told me I needed to talk to my counselor before I went home.
My counselor is one of those fake-happy plastic people. That annoys me beyond belief. I told her about my family and what was going on and she just made patronizing comments like, "Oh, your family is so horrible, you must feel terrible, do you ever want to kill yourself?" I'm a little pain in the ass sometimes so I said "Sure, who doesn't??" She asked me if I had though of how to do it yet. I said, "It so easy to make a plan, for instance, right now i could jump out your window and run out infront of all that traffic there. See? Easy."
She didn't like that.
She called my parents.
They came down to her office.
They said they wanted to help me.
It had gone on for too long.
They were taking me to the hospital.
I freaked out. I was jumping on her desk and the chairs, screaming at the top of my lungs, cussing out my stupid counselor etc etc. They wrestled me into the car and we were off.
In the emergency room the nurses injected a heavy dose of Ativan into my butt cheek and I passed out. I dont remember very much of that day/night, I guess I got a total of three ativans shots because I kept waking up and freaking out every few hours.
I woke up conciously in the back of a van with a metal grate separating the front and back halves, covered in a thin hospital blanket. The two people in the front of the van were in uniforms and I didn't recognize them.
I was headed to the psych ward of Providence Hospital in Portland. My parents were meeting us there, they told me.
So there I was, in the security room at the psych ward for adolescents. Two cameras, bricks over the window so you can't see out, a hard wooden bed and locks on the bathroom and main doors. After the first day I was moved to my own room. The ward was on the 6th floor and from the window seat in my room I had a lovely view of the parkade and the stream of ant-like people entering and exiting. I felt like a bird up there, in a huge steel and mortar cage.
After about a week (after they found out about how big of a druggie I was) they sent me to residential rehab in Gladstone. That was absolute hell. Since I was a respectful and non-violent type of lady I got completely overlooked by the staff because they were constantly busy dealing with the constant stream of fist fights, cat fights, breakdowns and generally destructive behavior coming from my peers. I felt like such an outcast. I did not belong except for that I did drugs, otherwise I was completely a misfit.
After I got out of there I had virtually no life, my parents were so protective of me. However, I was finally happy. Being all alone in that security room in the psych ward and having to fend for myself and keep myself company at rehab, I found that in myself I have one true friend. No matter what I've managed to get into, I'm always there for myself. Thankfully I realized that I am a good person and I deserve a lot more credit than I had been giving myself.
So in many ways I am very thankful I went to those places. It seemed rather horrible at the time, though.
When I got back to South my grades had fallen (I was gone about a month) and I had massive amounts of catch up work to complete. VERY overwhelming especially since early in the year I was so dedicated to doing well and really gave a lot of effort towards getting good grades only to lose them while I was further improving myself.
I got my license back about 1 month after I got out of rehab and that was such a wonderful sense of freedom for me. My friend Allie made me about 10 really great mix tapes (I dont have a CD player in there) and I would listen to them. Regularly I drove to the coast or deep within the unexplored (by me) countryside and all around the cities in Salem's general vicinity. I began to go on vision quests where I would follow the sun rising, drive into the sunrise, and mediate. Usually before I drove under the sunrise I was feeling centered and renewed. I formed my own religion having to do with the sunrise and sunset which comforted me because I could never find spiritual solace in any sort of Christianity that had been pressed upon me in the past.
Unfortunately, on my way to Eugene to visit a friend I was pulled over for speeding. I was going with the flow of traffic but I was pulling up the rear so I got the ticket. And my license got suspended again. Because it was in Eugene we had to pay the Lane Cty. Courthouse not the Marion Cty. (Salem's) and generally when you recieve a ticket your license will be revoked if you fail to pay the fine on time. We did, but Lane County neglected to inform the Oregon DMV (we DID pay close to the deadline, but still on time) and they revoked my license. We tried talking to a bunch of different people to try and explain the mistake but we got the same answer everywhere, "You're just going to have to wait it out.. sorry!"
God. :(
So I have to wait until September 12th to get my license back. That is the day after my 18th birthday and the day I can get my license back. I COULD have done it on my birthday but it's on a Sunday this year so again, I just have to wait.
I have pretty much gotten my act together by now. I have two part-time jobs and just got interviewed for a third. I'm a barista at the Blue Pepper Internet Cafe which is also an art gallery and custom framing shop. I work there three to five times a week. My other job is Head Groom (very prestigious... I get to boss around 2 twelve year olds that help at the stables and make them do stuff I don't want to do, like clean the bathroom [no groom should ever be forced to clean toilets.]} at Jory Hill Stables. Ironically, that's the stables I rode at my first time ever when I was almost 5 years old. Stranger still, the same horse I had my first ride on is STILL THERE and a couple weeks ago I taught a young girl how to ride on her. Very touching. So as a groom I get the horses ready for the trainer and put them away after they're worked, I do all clipping and bathing, I exercise horses sometimes and I go to all the shows and feed, braid and groom. I also am basically an apprentice to the trainer. In a few years I can probably manage the barn.
However, I'm going to have to take a break from working there until I get my license back. Last Sunday my mom tried to kill herself and was sent to the psych ward in Salem. I was able to bring her home on Friday afternoon but she is the one who gives me rides all the way out to the stable every few times a week and it's just too stressful, especially on days when she has to be at work herself. So I'm going to call it quits until I can transport myself. This makes me somewhat sad but I'll manage.
You're probably freaking out and reading that last paragraph again right now. Yeah, my mom's suicide attempt was really scary I was at the Blue Pepper when it happened and thank god she decided to try and die by the Willamette River because the Willamette River flows through Riverfront Park which is about 3 blocks from my work downtown at the Blue Pepper. Her friend called me and said I needed to get ahold of her right away, she'd said goodbye to her parents and to him and to a few other and told him to say goodbye to me for her. She'd taken all the pills in the house, drank 2 bottles of wine, slashed her wrists, arms and ankles and driven to the park. I called her right away and she answered. She was crying and I could barely understand her but she said she was at the river and mentioned fireworks but said she had to go, said goodbye and hung up. I went to the spot where we had seen them last month on the 4th. She wasn't there so I asked some people sitting on a bench if they'd seen anyone matching her description and they pointed me North. I was already on the phone with 911 at this point. Joe a friend who happened to be at my work visiting me when this all happened, ran to the park with me and saw her sitting under an abandoned bridge . Right as I was about to go look at her, the firetruck and ambulance came, then five cop cars. They told me to stay back. They shot her with tranquilizers out of a gun that looked like a sniper rifle and fished her out from the riverbank. I rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital and stayed there for a really long time, just watching her sleep it off.
The next day she got moved to the psych ward. It's really strange, I haven't even cried at all. The whole time of crisis I kept my head and tended to business. I stayed in the apartment we share alone while she was away. I did the shopping, laundry and cleaning. I'm like a little adult.
Someday soon I'm sure it's all going to hit me and then I'm probably going to have to cry.
On the other hand, my 18th birthday is only 27 days away and I'm wildly excited!