The Anti-Cool Girl (15 page)

Then they asked me to go.

I was in my room after drama school one night. Door closed as usual. Ben came and knocked on the door, which he never, ever did. I answered it, and he stood in the doorway almost like my room was not really part of the house, and he felt awkward coming in.

‘Look, Rosie, we need to talk about your living arrangements,' he said.

My heart sank. This was it. I'd ruined everything.

‘You know that we're moving out to renovate soon,' he said.

‘Yeah?' I replied, hoping that he was about to tell me we'd just be moving house for a while.

‘Well, I just thought you should know that Natasha and the girls and I won't be taking you with us, so you're going to have to organise somewhere else to live.'

Natasha and the girls. I had always hoped I was one of the girls.

‘Oh. Okay,' I replied. I didn't know what to say.

‘We can help you financially while you get on your feet, but you should know that this is going to be a permanent thing. When the house is done, we don't plan on having a room for you here.'

‘Oh.' I could feel the toxic butterflies awakening.

‘So, you should probably start looking for something as soon as possible,' he said.

‘Okay.'

He walked away. I shut the door and went and sat on my bed, in shock. I'd come to live with them when I was fourteen and I was now twenty. That's almost seven years, a longer consecutive period of time than I'd ever lived with my mum. I considered Ben and Natasha my family, and I'd just been told that they considered me nothing more than a person who lived in their house and soon no longer would.

I packed a bag and left the house about five minutes after that conversation. I never spent another night there. I went to stay with Rhiannon, sleeping on her couch. A few weeks later, we drove to Ben and Natasha's to pick up my stuff. They had
dumped everything on the porch and used my doona to cover it all from the rain. It smelled like it had been out there for a while.

I never heard from them again. They never called to check if I was okay. They never called to see where I had ended up. It was like I had never been a part of their lives. I bet Hamish was fucking thrilled.

I spent the next year couch-hopping. I stayed with Rhiannon for a while, I stayed with Mum for a while, I stayed with friends for a while. I was lost and alone, and had nowhere to go. I knew what I needed. I needed another boy to save me.

When a guy wearing nothing but a bedsheet as a toga pushes in front of you in the dinner line so he can get better dibs on the custard, you know you've hit rock bottom.

I was twenty-four, and I was in a mental institution. Pretty much nailing life.

It all began when I found the boy. The perfect, funny, good-looking boy. My year-long destructive partying phase was over, and I was looking for a distraction that was more permanent. I didn't want to just have sex in club toilets or do a line of coke to make the thoughts go away – that high never lasted long enough. What I needed was another Josh. I needed another boy to make me feel loved.

Of course, what I really needed was to learn how to love myself. To learn how to survive on my own and to actually face the pain and trauma from my past. But I had been through too much for one damn year, so when Luka told me he loved me,
that he wanted to marry me and have my babies, I gladly let myself be enveloped by it. If only I'd known that less than two years later, I'd be hustling in a dinner line at a mental home. And I don't even
like
custard.

Luka and I met at the movies. We both worked there with a bunch of other uni students and creative people, making popcorn and cleaning out the slushie machines. After couch-hopping for what seemed like an eternity, I moved into a share-house in Chippendale with a few other cinema staff. On my first night there, Luka stayed over, and he kissed me. ‘So, um, I kind of like you,' he said, in his charmingly geeky way. ‘I kind of like you too,' I replied, and we kissed again.

It would have been the perfect romantic moment if Luka hadn't already had a girlfriend. Kissing him that night was probably one of the worst things I've ever done, but I was so desperate to be loved that my usual moral compass was pointing only towards him. He had left every girl he'd ever been with for another, and in the back of my mind that worried me, but he promised me that I was different. He'd cheated on or lied to all those girls because he was confused or didn't care about them, but he
knew
he wanted to be with me. He could see a future with me. I was the girl he loved. And I believed him. He said every exact thing that I'd ever wanted to hear from a guy. I was intoxicated from the second he said ‘family' and kissed me on the nose.

I was smart enough to know that I shouldn't be getting into any kind of relationship. After relying on Josh, then relying on drugs and random sex, it was time that I learned how to rely on myself. I was also smart enough to know that any guy who cheats on someone else to be with you is eventually going to cheat on you to be with someone else. But the lure of a warm hug from a man who could make me forget my problems was too tempting to let go, even if he was an arsehole.

And, although I didn't realise it at the time, an arsehole was exactly what I needed. My desperation to be loved needed to come up against someone so selfish and shitty that it would force me into total meltdown. I needed a disaster to push me down to rock bottom, so that I could finally learn how to claw my own way out and build my own life.

Luka was that disaster.

The first warning sign was that he said he loved me after a week, which, believe me, is never, ever true. Someone telling you they love you when you've only been dating a week is like someone telling you they like
Two and a Half Men
when they've only seen the opening credits. It's a very big – and very misguided – call to make. There is just a whole lot more horrible shit coming that you couldn't possibly anticipate from only seeing the fun beginning. You only really know if love is there once you've waded through the mess and are still interested in sticking around.

Other warning signs came thick and fast. We had to keep our relationship a secret for the first few months, because he didn't want anyone to know that he'd left his previous girlfriend to be with me. When I eventually snapped and told people, he said I was selfish, and I had to promise to give him one head job a day forever to get him to stay with me. It was my suggestion, and although half-joking, I was still only
half
-joking. That's how fucking desperate I was. He wasn't interested in hearing about my family or my background because it made him ‘uncomfortable'. He seemed exasperated by my anxiety and depression. He would often belittle me in front of his friends.

Basically, Luka was just a young, selfish guy. He could be very sweet, but he always cared about his needs first, and since he had cheated on someone to be with me, I was just waiting for him to betray me in the same way. I had picked a saviour who was guaranteed to abandon me. Subconsciously I must have known things needed to explode, and he was the perfect dynamite.

After the first few months, when I could tell that his interest in me was waning, I panicked. I couldn't handle losing yet another promise of a family. And just like when I felt my mum pull away, and when I felt Josh pull away, and when I felt my aunt and uncle pull away, my body went into battle mode.

My mental health began to deteriorate pretty rapidly. I was cutting myself. My eating disorder was out of control and I
was gaining a lot of weight. If Luka didn't text me back after ten minutes, I became convinced he was with another girl. I was having constant panic attacks and I expected him to drop everything to help me fix the problem. I took to spending hours sitting in my wardrobe, because even the open space of my bedroom made me nervous. I attempted suicide two more times, all because Luka wouldn't answer the phone or would leave my house after an argument. I just couldn't face the pain of being alone and having the thoughts and memories come back.

I was falling apart, and Luka realised a lot quicker than Josh had that he didn't want any part of it. But just like with all his previous girlfriends, he was too scared to leave me until he'd found someone else. He said he wasn't sure if he loved me anymore and that he needed to take a break. I naïvely took that to mean, ‘I definitely love you, I just need some time to remember that.' What he actually meant was, ‘I definitely don't love you anymore, but there's this girl at work that I like and I want to see how that goes before I completely cut you loose.'

We spent about a month being together but not really being together. I would sleep with him whenever he wanted; partly because I craved closeness and partly because I thought it would make him love me (sidenote: having sex with a guy who doesn't love you will not make him love you). The awful thing about the sex during that month was that he refused to kiss me. It seemed like his way of reminding me that he hadn't
‘decided' yet. Like a sexual disclaimer: you can't get mad at me for sleeping with you because I made it clear with the no-kissing thing that it was just sex.

He called me, really drunk one night at 3am, and told me that he missed me and just wanted to be with me. He came to my house, said he was an idiot for ever letting me go, and then passed out on my bed. I spent the night physically holding his arms around me, nuzzling my head into his drunken, snoring face. Something in me knew that in the morning he would take it back, and I just wanted to be held before it was over, even if I had to hold his arms there myself. In the morning, he took it back.

A few weeks later he admitted that he'd been seeing a girl from work, and now she was leaving her boyfriend so they could be together. Oh, and he'd also finally decided that he definitely wasn't in love with me. I let out a scream of pain down the phone that shocked even me. I'd had no idea my body could make a sound like that. He told me it was unfair of me to be angry, since technically he had broken up with me over a month ago. And technically that was true. But it was a shitty technicality. A technicality that I knew was going to come back and haunt me every time I remembered he had been willing to put his dick in me, but refused to kiss me.

I was alone again, and it was my fault. Luka had been selfish, definitely, but I had also pushed him away with my craziness and
panic attacks and trust issues and cutting and suicidal thoughts and crying and memories.

I couldn't imagine ever finding one person in my life who wouldn't leave. All I wanted was to swallow every pill I could find and die, which had become my usual go-to plan at that point. But I decided to try something different that day. I knew I wanted to die because I wanted the pain to stop, so maybe if I got the pain to stop, I wouldn't have to die. I sat on my bed, a pile of pills on the doona in front of me, and instead of picking them up and swallowing them, I called my sister and told her I was suicidal. I told her I needed help. I told her that I was thinking about death and I wanted it to stop, and I was worried that if it didn't stop soon I would try it again.

She came and picked me up. I was in my pyjamas and could barely move. I was panicking and hysterical. She took me to the emergency room, where we waited for hours. A fairly exasperated nurse assessed me.

‘So, what's the problem?'

I could hardly speak. ‘Um, I'm feeling really suicidal, and I'm worried about what I'll do.'

‘What was that? Can you speak up?' she snapped, getting distracted by something going on in another room.

‘I'm, um, suicidal.'

‘But you haven't attempted?'

I didn't quite know how to answer that question. This was getting too hard. All I wanted to do was go home and swallow a bunch of pills and go to sleep forever. ‘Well, I have before, but not today.'

‘So you didn't feel bad enough this time that you decided to go through with it today?'

‘Well, no, I did. It's just, I'm worried about what I'll do, so I thought this time I'd try to reach out before I did anything.'

‘Right.' She looked bored. ‘Have you made specific plans, have you thought about exactly how you'd do it?'

I hate that question. Every time you admit to a medical professional that you're depressed or suicidal, they ask you if you've made ‘specific plans'. Like it's a dinner reservation and they want to know if you're serious about turning up. I think the idea is that if you haven't made specific plans, you're not really going to go through with it. Which is bullshit. Let me tell you something: any person who feels suicidal enough that they go and talk to someone about it has made specific fucking plans. People reach out because they're told time and time again that that's what they should do. Then they get asked about ‘specifics' in a way that always seems accusatory. Like if you had a plan, you would have just gone through with it and you wouldn't be here clogging up the ER.

‘Yes,' I mumbled.

‘What?' she said again. ‘Speak
up
.'

I could barely get my voice above a whimper. Also, it's humiliating to have to tell someone who looks like they're itching to go to lunch some of the most private thoughts you've ever had.

‘Um, pills. I was going to take pills.'

‘What pills?'

‘I don't know,' I said, tears welling in my eyes. ‘Just whatever I could find.'

She was writing on my chart and not looking at me. She told me they were going to give me a letter to give to my psychiatrist, and send me home with some Valium. I started to panic.

‘Wait, what? No. I need help. I need to stay here.'

‘I think you just need a little something to calm you down, and as long as there's someone with you, there's no reason you can't go home. We'll have someone from mental health services call you in a few days to see how you're doing.'

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Finally, for the first time ever, I had done what I was supposed to do – instead of taking the pills, I had reached out to someone who took me to the hospital. And now the hospital was sending me home. With more pills.

I mustered every bit of strength I had in my chaotic brain. ‘No,' I said, as assertively as I could manage, considering I was wearing pyjamas at lunchtime. ‘If you send me home, I will kill myself. I need to stay here.'

She sighed. ‘Are you threatening to kill yourself unless we admit you?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I'm afraid of what I'll do if I go home.'

‘You're afraid, or you'll actually do it?'

I couldn't believe I was playing this game of verbal chicken with someone I desperately needed help from.

‘I'll actually do it,' I said.

‘Fine,' she said before getting up and walking out of the room.

About an hour later, I was admitted into an emergency mental-health bed for an overnight stay. The next day, I was discharged. They didn't think I needed to be moved to the longterm facility because I ‘hadn't
actually
attempted'.

I got in a taxi, went home, found every pill in the house and took them all. These weren't just headache tablets. This was everything. Everything in my flatmate's room. Everything in my room. Everything in the bathroom. Everything in the kitchen. My head felt like it was on fire. Then, nothing.

I woke up in the emergency room, tubes coming out of a million different places and my two best friends standing over me. ‘Hey, crazy lady,' Tonz said, smiling. I loved that I had the kind of friends who would make inappropriate jokes while I was lying in a hospital bed. ‘Bad day?' We all burst out laughing.

Apparently my sister had been worried when I was discharged earlier that day. She called my flatmate and my best
friend Jacob, who found me unconscious on my flatmate's bed. They called an ambulance and I was rushed to hospital.

‘Was it because of Luka?' Jacob asked me, when Tonz was in the bathroom.

‘No. I don't know. Not really. I'm just sick of feeling like I want to die. It's all I think about. I can't turn my brain off. I really need help.'

‘They're going to help you now, sweetie,' he said, looking determined. I fell back asleep.

In the morning, I was told I was going to be discharged with a note to my psychiatrist and some Valium. I was too defeated to fight back, but Jacob wasn't. You just try and argue with a bitchy gay – you'll never win. Jacob was not leaving that hospital unless he knew I was going to be admitted somewhere, long term. He demanded to see whoever was in charge, and a big Eastern European doctor with a very seedy moustache and a booming voice came to meet us about an hour later. I'm fairly certain he was some kind of epic porn star in his homeland.