Emotional Turmoil

“You ever take Klonopin?”

“Klonopin, yeah!”

“Right?!”

“Jesus!”

“What day is it?”

“What about Trazodone?”

“Trazodone?”

“It flattens you out. I mean, you are done. It takes the light right out of your eyes.” - Silver Linings Playbook

Emotional Turmoil

“I should not have to reach crisis for you to believe my distress.”

I didn’t know how to cope with the acute emotional anguish I was experiencing, and no one else I knew did either. I was broken-down, my insides saturated in a deep sadness. Rage was my mask. I was desperate for someone to save me and at the very same time did not actually want to be saved.

“Most of all I longed for death. I know that now. I invited it. A release from the pain of living.” — Interview with The Vampire

Pluto in Scorpio in the 8th house

Pluto in the 8th house can have a compulsive fascination with death and some have an unconscious death wish.

My life plan was to overdose. Seemed like a fun way to go. I never thought I would live long and didn’t want to. I liked the idea of becoming part of the “27 Club” but really I didn’t even want to make it to 27… I was thinking more like 22. I thought I would just O.D. and that would be it. Story over.

Alas, no matter my efforts, the overdose never came. I feel like I came close to death on two occasions. The first time was in my Heroin Den Era. It was early morning and I had snuck out of some guy’s house after a full night of alcohol, cocaine, and ecstasy. High as a kite I walked my ass down the street and somehow made my way back to my apartment, which was miles away. Maybe I got on a bus or took a cab, I have no idea. When I got back to my apartment I proceeded to snort a fat line of oxycontin that my roommate left out for me (she was generous like that). I was still so high from all the blow and ecstasy and I remember when I took the oxy it felt like being struck by lightning. I’ve never been struck by lightning before… but for whatever reason, that’s the image that comes to me when I look back on this moment. I collapsed onto the couch. All I could see were these bright, blinking stars and I remember thinking this is it; I’m dying. I started breathing it in like I was smelling a sweet, aromatic flower. I thought death was finally coming for me and I was ready. Ironically I think the breathing is what kept me alive. I slept for over two days. I remember when I woke up my friends were like, “dude you’ve been out for a couple of days.” The second time I feel I nearly died I was living in Los Angeles. Me, a friend and our drug dealer were partying one weekday afternoon while my boyfriend was at work and I fell over, mid-conversation. I couldn’t come-to and they put me in an ice bath to try and wake me up. I remember being mad that they wouldn’t just leave me alone, “Just let me go”, I thought, “I’m fine.” But I couldn’t get the words out.

The first time I snorted heroin was after I “graduated” from an alternative school (a school for troubled kids). I had moved in with my friends, Chelsea & Justin, who I met through my drug dealer. I used to meet all my friends at my drug dealer’s house. I call this time period my Heroin Den Era because our apartment was like a heroin den except it wasn’t just heroin it was pills, coke, x … whatever tickled your fancy. We didn’t discriminate. Everyone who came to the apartment wanted to disappear, just like me. There was a certain understanding between us all, unspoken but felt. We all came from fucked up families, we all felt alone in the world. The trauma bond feels so real. A few minutes after I snorted my first line of heroin I got up and went to the bathroom to throw up. I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom but it felt like hours. I remember laying on floor next to the toilet and feeling like nothing mattered. I didn’t care that I threw up or that was laying on a dirty bathroom floor. I didn’t care about anything. Which, when you’re steeped in emotional turmoil, feels like a relief. Relief, at the time, to me, felt like happiness. I had found what I thought was love in the drugs and I was using whatever I could get my hands on. Snorting oxycontin & heroin, snorting and smoking cocaine, drinking heavily, and taking ecstasy. I never put a needle in my arm because no one I knew did that, surprisingly. I was working as a waitress at a place called Slider and Blues. It was a restaurant & bar where people would go after sporting events to celebrate. It had big TVs, games, pitchers of beer, pizza, and burgers. It was a popular place. My grandpa (paternal) knew the owner and he gave me a job even though I was underage. I would do coke in the back and get drunk with the cooks. I made pretty good money, over $200 a night on a busy night, and I spent it all on drugs. My boyfriend tried to help me. One day he brought me Mcdonald’s because he knew I hadn’t been eating and I threw the bag at the wall and started yelling at him. All I wanted was drugs. I didn’t care about anything else. I was a teenage junkie.

My parents had a very ugly divorce when I was seventeen years old. They had started going out late to an underground poker club on Greenville Ave where my Dad met some people who tricked him into investing in their bogus company, “Star Fluids”. I remember my parents thinking we were going to be millionaires but instead, my Dad ended up losing nearly half a million dollars. My mom was livid. She took a gun, walked outside in front of our house, and threatened to shoot herself. My dad overdosed on Xanax and was admitted to a mental hospital.

My relationship with my boyfriend, my first love, was over.

Everything in my life was falling apart.

Around this time, I started hanging out with Jason. Jason and I attended the same high school; he was as a senior when I was a freshman. We weren’t friends when we went to school together but we shared a drug dealer and learned we lived in the same neighborhood. We would walk over to each other’s houses and hang out. Jason was gay and I didn’t have to worry about him wanting to have sex with me like I did with all the straight guys. We became best friends; bonding over a shared hate for our mothers and a shared love for snorting pills. We could just get high together and cuddle and be sweet, which is all I’ve ever really wanted. Jason had a friend named Blake who went to SMU. We would go over to Blake’s parent’s house to get drunk and do blow in their back house. One day Blake called me and asked me out. Blake and I bonded over our shared love for cocaine. We would dress up and go out to nice dinners and then stay up all night together just getting drunk and high watching movies. Although Blake loved his cocaine, he did not approve of my heroin and oxycontin use. He would get mad at me about it. Blake would smoke pot every single day but only drank alcohol and used cocaine on Friday and Saturday nights. Sundays were for recovery. He made me laugh with his drug schedule. One time he came over to my dealer’s house because he knew I was there even though I wasn’t answering any of his texts or calls (this is the time of the Nokia phone) and he refused to leave until I came out of the house and left with him. He threatened to call the police on my dealer if I didn’t come out. I pretended like I hated it but really I loved it. I moved in with him for a while. Blake hated my mom, which I loved. He was one of the few who saw her for who she was. Blake had a really sweet mom & he was sweet to me. He cooked for me and taught me all about healthy food. Before I met Blake I was barely eating at all.

After my parents got divorced, my dad was in the hospital from the overdose of Xanax and my mom moved into a new house with her settlement money. The house was big and beautiful with high ceilings & a good sized backyard. My room was upstairs along with my brother’s and sister’s. My mother’s anger was ferocious. She was going out late, coming home completely wasted & sometimes not coming home at all. When she was home she was meaner than usual and mostly all she had to say were horrible, hateful things about my dad. One time I was innocently sunbathing topless in the backyard when she came home in a huff and puff, opened the back door, and screamed at me, “You little slut! Who knows who could have seen you! There are workers over there!”. There was a tall, wooden fence surrounding the backyard and I remember thinking she was insane. I was heavily sedated. Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Vicodin, Oxycontin. I was also drinking heavily and using cocaine. I remember coming home completely blitzed, barely being able to climb the stairs, barely being able to stand up. I have this memory of me in my bathroom, using my bathroom counter to hold myself up because I couldn’t stand on my own, looking at myself in the mirror, witnessing how sad I was.

When I was 18 years old I got my very first car. My Dad’s old, 80’s, ice blue, BMW 5 Series. It still had the old-school car phone in it. At the time it was embarrassing but looking back now it was completely epic. I wish I still had it. I didn’t get my license until I was 18 (thank god) as part of my never-ending series of high school punishments but when I turned 18 I was finally free to hit the road. Unfortunately, my newfound freedom didn’t last long. A few months later I totaled the car by way of a median pole. I was on my way home from a devastatingly drunken, humiliating night of harassing my first love, Travis (who clearly I was not over) outside of his parent’s house. I parked out front, drunkenly calling and sending him text messages wanting him to come out and see me. He refused. I had driven there from Blake’s, which was nearly half an hour away. Blake tried to stop me from driving but there was no way anyone was stopping me from doing what I wanted to do back then. I was a vicious fighter. I got into actual physical altercations. I would hit you, throw things at you, scream… people were scared of me. Although Blake wasn’t able to stop me, he followed me out to the car and put on my seatbelt, consequently saving my life that night. When I left Travis’s house I remember the car kept bumping against the curb, it felt like bumper cars. I don’t remember hitting the actual pole but when I came-to the airbag had gone off. The door was jammed shut and I had to kick out the driver’s side window and crawl through to get out. The front of the car was entirely smashed. When I got out of the car I looked down at myself and saw blood all over my clothes. I sat down on the side of the road. I don’t remember crying, I think I must have been in shock. I wasn’t a cryer back then. I didn’t really start crying until I was 35 years old. A woman happened to drive by and pulled over. It must have been 3 am. She called the police and let me use her phone to call my best friend at the time, Carly. When the police officer arrived, rather than give me a DUI, which he very easily could have done, he hugged me. It was a real hug. Thinking about this moment brings me to tears to this day. He hugged me hard and told me he had a daughter my age and if he ever saw her like this, he didn’t know what he would do. He told me I was lucky I had my seatbelt on, that if I didn’t I would have gone through the window and hit the pole. I remember begging him not to call my parents and he didn’t. He let Carly take me home and towed my car. I’ll never forget this police officer’s kindness. The next day I woke up at Carly’s sore and numb. I remember seeing my blood-stained clothes in a pile on the floor. My body ached for a week. I didn’t tell my dad about the car for a few days. I don’t remember what I told him but I think I lied and said it was stolen. I’ve been in many a car accident… Me and cars have a long history of trouble. Carly flipped her car when we were out driving together one night and, again, I had to kick out the window and crawl out. No blood, though. Carly told me to go hide in the nearby bush because she thought it would be better, that she would get in less trouble, if there was only one person in the car. I hid in the bushes and after the police came I called another friend to come and pick me up. One time a friend and I were driving around on Valium and we ran into a huge bush. Luckily we were on a small, residential street and had been driving very, very slowly. It was like a slow-motion bushwack. It took us a while to even notice we had been stopped by this bush. We just started laughing. On the streets of LA, I was hit on my passenger side as I took a left-hand turn, smashing the door, and totaling the car. Someone broke the window of my Jetta and stole my laptop in Venice. I totaled my friend’s Jetta one rainy LA morning, completely sober. I’m pretty sure all this repeated car trauma is rooted in this first horrific accident.

When my dad got out of rehab he said I could live with him (after I begged him) and we went apartment hunting together. Downtown Dallas was having a comeback moment and my dad and I found a cool loft in a newly restored building, the Dallas Power & Light building: DPL. Downtown was an up-and-coming destination in Dallas and living there felt invigorating and inspiring. It felt like a fresh start. My dad was quiet at first, distant, and sad… but that was all normal. It was better than living with my mom’s vengeance. My dad loved filling the industrial loft space with new furniture and art. He loved to play music. I was thrilled to be there. My brother and sister stayed with my mother and came to visit on the weekends. They were both young and deeply influenced by my mother’s contempt for my father. It was a really hard situation. The energy when they came felt extremely uncomfortable. The DPL Building was a party scene. There was a buzzing new restaurant downstairs & a rooftop bar with a pool. The building was newly remodeled and it was gorgeous. Nearly every night it was raging. I remember finding people in the elevators in the morning passed out from the night before. I fit right in. I got a job as a hostess at Fuse, the restaurant downstairs. I became friends with the bartenders and they would give me drinks even though I was underage. Everyone knew my dad and me. My dad started using drugs again and I was, too. We never did drugs together but I would find his bags of cocaine in the kitchen drawer. They were big bags. He started drinking tequila out of a champagne glass. My dad is a manic depressive and he went into a mania stage. I didn’t know it at the time, but my dad had become a major drug dealer in the downtown scene. He was a businessman, had lost almost everything, and I guess this was his way of coping. He started becoming easily enraged and I was a target. I think he wished I wasn’t there. I was cramping his newly single style. There was a clothing boutique on the first floor of the building called Crimson in the City that I frequented. A woman named Stefani owned it and because I was in there all the time trying on clothes we became friends. Stefani was about 40 years old, with shoulder-length blonde hair, in great shape (she was a bodybuilder in a past time in her life!), loud, wild with a funky, eclectic style. She was at Fuse nearly every night and always had cocaine. We got along great. We’d go out to O Bar across the street and see Owen Wilson in the back corner. It was easy to get into clubs when I was with Stefani. She’d let me help her pick out what to buy for the store. She let me come stay with her and her daughter, Avery, when my dad got too out of control.

Eventually, things with my dad got violent and I had to move out.

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” — Home, by Warsan Shire

I met Chelsea through Carly. They both worked at the same boutique in Highland Park Village and we would all go out together after work. Chelsea was a tiny little thing. She was from Wimberley, TX. I remember her having a really strong work ethic, something I admired in her. She played hard but she worked hard, too. I really liked Chelsea. She called me Nat and I called her Chels and then we started calling each other Chat and Nels and then we decided to move in together at The Phoenix apartment complex, across the street from Mockingbird Station. We would make “cocaine snakes” on our living room table, just one, long, massive, thick, curved line (hence the name ‘snake’) of cocaine from one end of the table to the other and take hits off it throughout the night. We’d order pizza and just smoke pot & eat & lounge all day. We had a nonstop flurry of boys coming in and out. Chelsea was even more boy-crazy than I was. We met a new coke dealer and started working for him, handing out drinks in his underground poker house. As you can imagine, this did not end well. I’m not going to share what exactly happened because it’s not my story but it wasn’t good. I was working at an ice cream place that was connected to a bar in Mockingbird Station. I was living in this apartment with Chelsea when Scott and I met at an SMU fraternity party. Scott was a Sigma Chi with with big brown eyes, curly brown hair and a huge, beautiful smile. We were a couple of the last ones standing at the party; we were both floating around topless in the pool while we watched the sunrise. After we got out of the pool I was ready to crash so Scott showed me to an empty bedroom in the house. Some time later, I was woken up by the bed literally shaking from some frat boy jacking off right next to me. Totally horrified, and angry, I got up out of the bed & left the room. I kid you not, the kid kept fucking going. I was so grossed out and complained to Scott, who was still awake. While I felt completely violated and shocked, Scott was pretty unphased. I was irritated at his reaction. He got me a cab home. Not a great first impression. I didn’t like him at all in the beginning. He texted me later and apologized and asked to take me out to dinner to make it up to me. The first time I got pregnant was with Scott. My first pregnancy was the hardest, I locked myself in the bathroom. Scott knew right away that he didn’t want to keep it and it hurt my feelings. Not to say I think I should have had a baby! Or that I even wanted one. It wasn’t so much about wanting to have a baby but rather that Scott knew, without a second thought, that he didn’t want to have one with me. Salt on a rejection wound. Deep down, like so many of us, I’ve always just wanted to be chosen. I used to think having a guy want to have a baby with me was like being his chosen one. It’s kind of like how I’ve always wanted someone to propose to me even though I don’t really want to get married. Scott took me to planned parenthood but I was too early on in the pregnancy and they told me to come back a week later. The abortion itself wasn’t painful, I took a pill and laid on a reclining chair in a dark room with other girls who were going through the same thing. Scott wasn’t very empathetic to the whole situation and this is when I knew for sure I wasn’t in love with him. Alas, a few weeks later, I ended up moving to Los Angeles with him.

“I was broke, fearless, with nothing to lose… and my dream, more than anything, was to become anyone else other than who I was.” — American Hustle