I look back sometimes and though it's excruciating to remember, let alone write, I am thankful for something finally happening to me that has set me straight even if it was through fear. I don't think that I would've gotten the message in any other way; social workers, counscellors, family members and parents had never got through to me in the least nor did they understand. I guess, I just needed to find myself on my own.

When I awoke the next morning, relieved to be alive, much of the diphenhydramine had worn off and I was no longer high or "loopy" from it. I was able to think straight, function and make a clear judgement which at the time I had taken as if it were a gift straight from the freaking heavens. Glory Hallelujah, I was going to be okay!

I was in really bad shape though, and well, at least I had felt like it. I was dressed in a hospital gown with my clothes in a messy bundle at the foot of the emergency room cot while hooked up to an IV and heart monitor. My first thought was to reach over and begin folding them, maybe ask for something that I could put them in but I was too drowsy to carry it out. I remembered then an old friend from years back telling me that I "didn't suffer" from depression. That pissed me off. Yeah, I would've liked her to see me at that point and then tell me that I didn't suffer from it. Bitch.

Towards the end of my visit I had a few friends come to visit me, though no-one in my family or my father (who I was living with at the time) had the time to make it or bothered to; I don't know which. Though I could imagine them gossiping much more easily rather than coming to my room, holding my hand and telling me: "It's okay. You're okay, and we're all glad you're okay."

I had even learned that after my stay that my father's vacancy and not allowing my step-mother to visit was his way of "teaching me a lesson"- whatever that could mean. He is like a big child himself, irratic, always in some sort of mood swing and often throwing temper tantrums; at least, that is what I've gathered from his behaviour. He falls short in many areas, more than I could describe, and is only able to be kind when he wants something from someone. I have made a solid promise to myself that I will never be like him.

Home was no more peaceful than the hospital had been with him around, and honestly, the day I'd been discharged I have almost wanted to return. I was the same panicky, distressed girl that I had been when I was in the ambulance; I kicked myself many times for masking my way into deceiving my psychiatrists. "How was jail? Food good?" he'd ask, and I wanted nothing more than to ask him the same thing.