“While we wait for the pills to take effect, we either (a) worry about or (b) look forward to our new personality. Will we recognize ourselves? We hope so, we hope not. In the ideal situation, we will be ourselves, but enhanced—calmer, funnier, the kind of person who could be described as stable. We hope against hope that once the pills help us stop sabotaging our relationships, pushing away and/or stalking our lovers, and throwing things at people, maybe we’ll get boyfriends or girlfriends who stick around. We’ll sleep better, wake without dread, and our smiles will come back. We won’t go on any more impulsive shopping sprees, and we’ll always be able to pay our rent.
Or maybe we don’t dare hope for a good life, because a good life is a foreign concept. We wouldn’t know it if it bit us. Instead, we just hope for tranquillity, and if that comes at the expense of having no personality and taking up permanent residence on the couch, so be it.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“THE TATTOO ARTIST inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller of those.
This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that’s already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“On the surface, my life during that time was relatively normal, consisting of grad school, waitressing jobs, and a lot of moving around—much like many other people’s twenties. But most people don’t threaten to kill themselves more days than not, and most people don’t require their friends to be on constant suicide watch. Most people do not have the psych emergency room on speed-dial.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“I wrapped my legs around him, because I knew he liked it, and I thought if I could just please one person for one minute maybe I could at least be good for something. Maybe there might at least be something I could do.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“The problem with the savior complex is that eventually our saviors get very tired indeed. It is too much trouble to keep dragging us back from the ledge, and it’s not their job anyway. In the end, we can only save ourselves, but generally need psychiatric help to do it.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“I narrowed my life to nothing but survival and sleep, becoming a very efficient creature. I no longer did things for pleasure, so I required no excess light or water. I did not read or soak in bubble baths—in fact, I washed myself simply by squatting in the bathtub in front of the faucet, not even putting the plug in the drain. Comfort was too much trouble, as was standing up in the shower. I needed little energy, and as such, little food. That winter I simply waited to disappear.
Lying sleepless for hours on end beneath a pile of blankets and discarded clothes—too exhausting to put them on hangers, to figure out if they were dirty or clean; once a week I shoved the whole mass into the washer and threw them back on the bed when they were dry—I pretended I was a prisoner, doing time in my own head. I remembered a story we’d read at Governor’s School, Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which the happiness of a utopian city is dependent upon one forgotten child suffering in a basement, a sacrificial victim. I pretended I was performing a meritorious act, as opposed to simply giving in to depression without a fight. I longed for uninterrupted sleep, but it never came—I catnapped like a prisoner constantly afraid of sudden attack.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“I fell apart with a whole new level of tragedy and drama. My room in our big old drafty house was right next to the living room, and I couldn’t bear having people that close to me. I decided I didn’t deserve windows—there was always some new thing I didn’t deserve—so I moved into the basement. Cincinnati had a record snowfall that winter, more snow than I had ever experienced in my life, and the one small window I did have was always obscured by drifts. Fair enough, I deserved that too. I found the black hole inside me and lived there.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“I remember running out the door and sitting in the hallway crying. I remember my black eyeliner dripping on my white T-shirt and leaving little dots. I remember half of me falling away, and my surprise that there always seemed another half of me to do so. What percentage of my original self was I by that point? A quarter? An eighth? A sixteenth?”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“One night I sat on Reese’s bed, naked, shivering, and he told me I was just too much of an actress for him.
“What?” I squeaked, as my vision narrowed to that pinprick that precedes impending doom, the one where you know everything is about to change and you are in the last remaining seconds of the reality to which you have become accustomed.
“You just…sometimes you’re just too intense. Like you’re always acting.”
Of all the words in the world I hate, intense may very well be the one I hate the most. It is certainly the one which, when leveled at me, carries with it the shame of all the times I’ve heard it before, and embarrasses me like a small child who has just peed her pants.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”
“But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar: they are afraid of you, have grown tired of you, unable to put up with the bottomless pit of your need and despair. You become disillusioned with them for being unable to do so, and the good old borderline “splitting” comes into play: they are mean, you are bad, everything is one way or the other and you have no more options than you did in the place from which you ran.”
— Stacy Pershall, from “Loud in the House of Myself.”