I've Got a Fixation, an Inclination

Once upon a time, I fucking hated my life. So I drowned myself. In alcohol, in drugs, in meaningless sex. It was numbing, it was cathartic. It felt cleansing. I didn't have to be me, not completely, and what more could I ask for?

I didn't have some big sob story, nothing anyone will make a movie about one day. Shailene Woodley will never be cast as me, Lana Casey, and portray me as strong but tortured. No one will ever say about me, "She was so strong and selfless, I wish that I had known she was having troubles. I would have tried my best to help." Instead, they may say "Lana? That girl was trouble. She was friends with my son even though I tried my best to keep him away from her. I always told my husband that her parents needed to step up and do something. That girl was out of control. I always thought it was just a matter of time before she ended up in prison or pregnant. Or both, God forbid."

I guess you could say that in my primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestant town of 8,000 people, I was something of a menace. Boys loved to "date" me, and parents loved to hate me.

Up until I was about fifteen I was just like every other meek teenage girl in that goddamn town, taught to believe that my purpose was to become a wife and mother and maybe I could got to college and get a degree to feel useful but my husband would never allow me to use it. I followed the crowd just how I was supposed to.

I started high school and made friends with the perfect group of girls. Perfect blonde hair, perfect skinny and tanned bodies, perfect manicured nails, perfect clothes consisting of the latest and greatest fashions. I was taller than a freshman girl should be, five feet, ten inches. Taller than any of my friends and about half the boys at school at least by an inch. Long dark hair that didn't like to behave, eyes a bland shade of blue, and skin so pale that my brother often made jokes about needing sunglasses to look at me. My appearance alone made it obvious that I did not belong, and everything else about me just solidified it.

I just wanted to be at home, in solitude. I wanted to read and I wanted to write. I wanted to immerse myself in other worlds, other beautifully flawed worlds. Instead of this just plain flawed one. I wanted to sing and write poetry and play Texas Hold 'em with my brother.

I didn't want to wear makeup, take on the tedious task of forcing my hair into submission each morning, spend all day trying to impress people who didn't matter to me, stand in front of the mirror and judge my body based on other people's impressions of it, or give up my precious alone time. However, once I began my freshman year of high school, my mother explained to me that I must do each of these god-forsaken things each day, because who I was before could never be enough. The girl who liked to read in her windowsill, walk alone in the rain, save her words for those who
deserved them, and was perfectly content to have no friends would never cut it.

So I needed to change. Because who could like the girl I was? So my mother bought me makeup and spent hours teaching me how to apply it. She would not leave until I could show her that I could apply eyeliner perfectly, without ever a quiver of the hand sending the pencil off its course. My mother put me on a diet. Water, fruit, vegetables, and small portions of meat only. No more bread, bagels, or pasta. No more cereal, mashed potatoes, or cheese.

I became hyperaware of how I looked. Flinching when I would stroll past a mirror, averting my eyes so that I could save the disappointment, so evident in my face, for when I could strip naked in front of the mirror in my bedroom and squeeze any extra skin on my body and curse it. I would have stopped eating altogether, if not for my mother's insistence that starving myself would only cause me to gain weight, and if not for the judging eyes in the lunchroom that I always felt burning into my skin.

If you eat, you're a fat pig. If you don't eat, you're an anorexic freak to be avoided at all costs. You have to find the perfect middle ground, halfway between starving yourself and eating the perfect amount of the food pyramid, and they call this gray zone "self control".

Each day was a struggle, and saying that makes me feel guilty because there are people with real struggles. "Oh no, a heterosexual white middle class American girl hates her body, and she feels that everything that makes her unique is being stomped out of her slowly but surely, get Obama on the phone!" I'm not stupid or completely self centered. I know that in the grand scheme of things my problems were equal to a mosquito bite on the Jolly Green Giant's ass, but it was still really fucking hard to deal with. Waking up everyday was a battle, and talking to people and acting like the happy fifteen year old girl that I was supposed to be was exhausting.

My mother decided that since I wasn't "showing any interest in my favorite activities" I was depressed. I couldn't break it to her that my "favorite activities" were actually things that I found completely despicable, and she must be nuts because I never showed any interest in those things. But she took me to the doctor, and the doctor told my mother, yes I was depressed, and prescribed some pills I was supposed to take every day.

I had absolutely no desire to swallow a little pink pill every morning and I wouldn't have, had it not been for my oh-so-involved in my life mother who served them with breakfast. And by "breakfast", I am referring to the apple I am allowed in the morning.

I couldn't tell if it was the pills or just daily life, but I began to feel less like me, and more like nobody. Each day I cared less about staying true to who I am, and more about not existing.

My friends were awful. Each and every one of them was a shell of a beautiful happy girl. Their faces, once so fresh and round when we played on swing sets and slides, were now hardly faces at all, but masks of cosmetics. Their bodies, once soft and supple, were now angular and sharp from too much exercise and not enough food, stiffly walking about in a facade of a care-free attitude.

One stupidly cold May night, nearly the end of the school-year and I had scraped by with B's, my "friends" were all going to a party, and of course I was expected to go as well. I so badly wanted to stay home, the last party I went to a guy I did not like spent most of the time trying to kiss me with his nasty beer-breath. This night, I begged my mother to tell my friends I couldn't go, I didn't care what reason she gave them, I just did not want to go to the party, and the only 'no' they would accept would be from my mother.

Of course, she did not tell them no. Instead she explained to me that socializing would be good for me. I don't spend enough time outside of school with my friends and it would make all of our friendships stronger if I went to this party. I knew it was bullshit, I also knew that I had no choice, my mother would drive me to the party herself if she needed to, and the the only thing worse than going to this party was being dropped off there by my mother.

So my friends picked me up outside my house and we headed outside of town where the party was almost directly behind the "Independence Welcomes You!" sign. Loud music and drunk teenagers, a wonderful advertisement for our fair city.

Once inside the house, where the music was louder and the teenagers drunker, I did not feel a bit better about coming. I really just wanted to go home. My friends and I stuck together, laughing and drinking really bad beer out of red solo cups, but little by little my friends were lured off somewhere by boys, or by other friends, or just because they saw something more interesting to do. All but me, and eventually I sat by myself, watching the people and sipping my stale beer. I tried to make myself as small as possible in my corner of the couch, attempting to get away from the hormone-crazed couple on the other end of the couch without actually getting up and moving away. I was pretty sure that I wouldn't find another place to sit all night.

After two hours and twenty one minutes (I counted) I was getting progressively more depressed with each second and I would do anything just to go home. I looked around for my friend who drove us here to ask her to take me home but I couldn't find her. I tried calling her cell phone but no answer. I tried a few other friends, but no answer as well.

I made my way outside, holding an inner dialogue with myself as to whether or not it was worth it to call my mom to pick me up. I did not want to be here. I felt ready to commit mass murder, I was so wound up and slightly drunk. My mother would set her pretty face in a frown though, and tell me that quitting will get me nowhere. Friends aren't made by running away all the time. Didn't I care about having friends and being popular? No mother, I have never cared, it has always been you. I have never wanted this! I just wanted my books and my bathtub and my lace curtains and the smell of a textbook and the hidden library under my bed and the feeling of cards in my hands and my little brother's laugh and my-

"Hey, um, are you alright?"

I snapped out of my desperation fueled inner monologue because of the simple question spoken by a husky voice much too close to my ear for comfort. I fell back into my body, back on earth, and I smelled cigarette smoke, beer, pine, and Axe body spray. Axe is bad enough but mixed with all of those things, it was an asthmatic's worst nightmare.

The person standing to my left, face aglow by the light of the porch lamp and strobe lights finding their way out the window, was one I had seen around school but never spoken to. I knew his name, Carter, I also knew that he preferred to be called C, I knew that he was supposed to graduate last year but he is a legendary slacker and still has a couple years left before he'll have all the necessary credits. I knew he was nineteen and was rumored to have a baby with a girl one town over. I knew he was the person everyone went to when they needed to score something.

However, I did learn something in that moment that I wasn't entirely aware of beforehand. He was fucking gorgeous. Dark hair, bright blue eyes, the perfect (almost too perfect?) amount of scruff shadowing his chin, and several inches taller than me.

This was not a John Green novel, I did not think all of these things in the span of two seconds and then respond to him within an acceptable time-frame with a well-thought out quip to prove that I was, in fact, okay, and too strong of a person to need his validation for whatever negative emotions I was feeling in that moment.

Instead, I stared at him blankly while all of those thoughts and observations ran through my brain, and honestly I had forgotten he had spoken to me at all until he waved his hand in front of my face and laughed darkly, saying "Yoo-hoo, anybody home in there?"

Once again, I snapped back to reality at the sound of his husky voice uncomfortably close to me.

"Oh sorry, I was distracted. What did you say before?" I responded at long last.

There it was again, that laugh that sounded both deeply amused and cruelly mocking at the same time. "I asked if you're alright. You're not looking so hot."

I couldn't tell if he meant "not looking so hot" as in ugly, or troubled. "I'm fine, thank you though." Conversations with strangers were never my strong point.

Deeply unsettled, I started to turn away to pretend I had something more important to be doing.

"That's good," he said, sounding like he was holding his breath, "Want a hit?"

I turned in time to see him slip his lighter back into his front left pocket and breathe out marijuana scented smoke.

I had never done any illegal drugs in my life. I had never wanted to. It just seemed like a waste of time to me. But standing in front of me was a really hot boy who was four years older than me, and had for some reason given me his attention. I didn't want to be a waste of his time.

Some unseen force took control of my body and sent me toward him, made me take the joint from his fingers, bring it clumsily to my mouth, and suck the smoke out of it.

"Hold it in babe," C said to me, "Hold it in."

When I set the smoke free from my lungs, I only coughed once, which was not nearly what I expected.

And somehow, I felt light. I took another drag from the joint, released the smoke, and felt lighter still. With each breath of the smoke, I felt more of my worries dissipate. I felt like I was floating above it all.

And that's where my downfall began.