Depression

I am always one confrontation, one bad day, one rejection, one bad grade or failed exam away from a nervous breakdown. When things happen, my first response is that it is the worst thing to ever happen, which is sort of funny because when your mom is a junkie ex-con, your father overdosed on heroin, and you ate things out of trash cans, it really should add perspective to just about everything else that happens. But for some odd reason it never does.
And then that cold black wave cascades over me, and I can't even wash my hair, make a meal, complete a task, or be bothered to talk to anyone. It is such a slippery when wet slope that I constantly worry about taking people down with me.
Sometimes, well really a lot of times, I think about dying. I even know the most courteous and convenient way to do it, if that is even possible. Then I remember how many people love me, and think about me, and how it would let them down, and how I never want anyone to think anything bad about me after I'm gone and can't redeem myself, so I never do. I tried once, in 7th grade. Actually I tried 5 times that day, but my body kept jerking up and wouldn't let me suffocate. My 12 year-old brain decided that was a sign that I shouldn't complete the morbid task at hand, so I ripped up all the notes and threw them in the trash bin.
I think about suicide a lot, and a few of my friends know this, so they make sure to check in on me, but I know myself well enough that I would never do it. I want to be a doctor someday, and if I kill myself how am I going to save people? I once called the suicide hotline and talked to a girl for over an hour. I was hysterical at first and started talking to her about all my family issues and how I just tried to deal with all of it on my own. She validated my depression, my thoughts of suicide, by telling me, "You have had a rough time of it, I would almost be more worried if you felt nothing. You don't have to do this alone though. It is okay to feel these things, just reach out." I really liked her, and she may have saved my life that day.
We are never really alone. We might feel that way, but only because everyone's pain is their own. Whether your pain is a falling GPA, or your parents got divorced, or your partner broke up with you, or your grandma died, we all feel those things differently. It is our ability to empathize and not be selfish with ourselves that make us un-alone. There is always someone, whether it's your bartender, some girl on a suicide hot line, your mom, best friend, uncle or sister, or maybe some depressed messy girl with a shitty blog, there is always someone who is willing to be there for you when you need it; you just only have to ask.

La Mère et le Père

My whole family, give or take a few members, have been in the fishing industry for many years. My father worked as a dungeness crab fisherman in Alaska. It was a dangerous job, but my dad, like many of the Lloyd clan, were "adrenaline junkies". In their old age, which for us is past 45, most of them have settled down, gotten sober, and even a little chubby. My mother's father and my father worked on or around the same boats. From the beginning the relationship was destined to be tumultuous. 9 years her senior, and she was just 16. She was tall and beautiful, at least for 80's standards, with big hair and pastel-gloss lips. To this day I forget what color her eyes are, because she has never had the same eye color as me, and frankly I have never taken much to looking her in the eye; lies hurt me less that way. They fought all the time, as would be expected for a 16 year old girl who thinks she knows everything about the world and rarely ever really knows anything at all, at least not the stuff that comes with time and life lived.
2 years later, and pregnant with me, my grandmother sat her son and my mother down and told them what everyone else already knew: that they should give the baby up for adoption, because neither of them were ready to have children. They both agreed, though eventually my very pregnant mother ran away. I still do not understand this, though she has always been really good at running away from her problems, and perhaps this is where I learned to never deal with mine. She shacked up with some 45 year old drug dealer in Anchorage, while my father's family papered Alaska with "missing" posters. While everyone was worried, she was dealing drugs. They only found her once she was in labor at the hospital. 10 days after I was born I was taken away by my mother's mother for testing positive for heroin and cocaine, and I didn't see my mother or father for almost 18 months, when my mother came to get me with her new and terrifying husband.

Mother

My mother and I have a very complicated non-existent relationship. As soon as I was born, my grandparents requested that I be drug tested. I was positive for cocaine and heroin. She was expected to go to jail and complete a treatment program of sorts and I was sent to live with my grandmother, who is equally as crazy as my mother and my aunt in-law who is a gem of a woman, flaws and all.
Fast forward to years later, when I was about seven years old. My mother came to visit on Easter. She was too skinny, and too sketchy, so when she showed up and requested that I accompany her to pick up "some friends" my father denied her of this privilege. She had actually kidnapped me before, which a very hard thing to understand when you are a kid. How could your own parent kidnap you? She put up a fuss at being told no, but calmed down and said that she would be back within the hour.

I waited by the window, looking out and hoping that every car that passed would be her and her friend, coming to spend time with me. I waited some more, Easter basket being of no interest to me. Finally dinner came and went, the sun went down and it was time to get ready for bed. I waited almost 3 years for her. The next time I would hear from her would be over the phone, with an automated operator asking me if I would accept a phone call from an inmate. That inmate ended up being my mother.

In the beginning...

I am writing this because I needed to tell my story somewhere. A personal confessional, in the hopes that perhaps someone somewhere will read it, and laugh and cry and maybe someone will see it and feel a little bit more like they aren't the only one with a messy past that sits under an uncertain future.

I was born 25 years, 7 months, 29 days and 4 hours ago in Anchorage, Alaska. My mother, barely 19 years young, gave birth to a 7 pound 7 ounce baby girl. She had run away from everything--my father, her family and a possibility for a good life for both of us--to live with her drug dealing 40-something year old boyfriend. She told me, many years later that she had also been dealing drugs while she was pregnant with me, and was offered five-thousand dollars to name me Kilo at one point. Obviously she didn't, though I joke that she really should have taken the money and done it. Instead, she decided to give me the last name of her drug dealing boyfriend, for no money. That is how my life started, with some stranger's name as mine, testing positive for cocaine and heroine. I could write it off as being in the 80's, and that was just part of the culture of the decade, but you really can't excuse anything like that. I could also pretend that I am not still angry about it, that I have forgiven her, and that she has seen the error of her ways, but I can't tell you that. This is not a happy story, and it has no happy ending...yet. I will say that after many years, I reconnected with family and found out that my aunt in-law took care of me the first seven months of my life, and this gave me a fighting chance.