When I was younger, much younger, in a desperate attempt to escape my parents overly controlling nature (the whole "I don't care you had the best grade in the class, you didn't have 100%. You made a mistake." drill, combined with (often physical) punishments that quickly escalated into something horrendous, and my mother's weird impression that everything that was not a sweet "yes mom, sure mom, no problem mom" with a smile was the utmost disrespect and proved that I was an ungrateful, selfish child), I started going for walks after school, or at night, especially in winter. Often with friends, but sometimes I pretended and went alone.
That's eventually how I got approached to deliver things (not very legal things, that is) to people by some, well, people. It's an easy trick, you promise the kid whatever (candy, pocket money, protection from bullies) and get them to do really easy dirty work, because no one suspect kids, because kids are often too dumb or candid to realize what the f is going on. I thought.. god bless me, I thought they were like, maybe alcohol and cigarettes at worst. I never realized. At first.
I got pretty involved, as the years went. I won't go into the details unprompted because it makes people either uncomfortable, or they feel that I am showing off. I'll just say it was, in retrospect a very dark part of my life, and that I am glad I did not realize the implications of what I did when it was happening because it was pretty fucking bad. Maybe another reason why I won't go into details is because you might never talk to me again if I did.
It ended in an ugly manner, as most of these stories do. Sometimes, people I was used to seeing, people I delivered to, or for, just.. went away. I wouldn't see them anymore.
Eventually it was another kid who did the same thing I did. And her brother. On the news they said it might be their mother had abducted them. They were never found. I guess I'll never know, all I recall is how for the first few days I did not know what was going on, and I kept calling her over and over and over again and no one ever picked up.
Then I sort of went away from that world, I say sort of because, well, I guess, I sell drugs and used to do really hard drugs all the time and well I'm, after all, an high end escort so as such, I guess it's a bit true when they say it's really hard to escape this world. It just becomes a part of you, I guess the "average person" can't think of themselves as "someone who does cocaine" or "someone who old disgusting men pay to have sex with" and that crossing that line, becoming such a person, becomes much easier when you've been around that sort of people.
Then there was this girl, who was talking about taking her life. And then she disappeared from the internet. For months. Six months, roughly. I thought that for sure, she was dead. She came back one day. I was relieved. And angry at her. I was in sixth grade I think.
Years later she would tell me the story, that it was the same thing on her side, this guy she liked just stopped coming online, for days, so one day she called him and his father answered, and just hung up brutally when she asked for him. She did a bit of research with her best friends. He had taken his life.
A few more people disappeared like that from my life. Some I found out died from illness, or an accident. Often it would take me years to find out. Some I'm still without news of. There was that guy, from an IRC channel I went to frequently when I was about 14.. we chatted on ICQ for a few years.. he called himself "bemaniraver".. he was from California as I recall, about my age, maybe a year or two older, jewish, redhead, my stupid teenage self liked his wit and sense of humor. The last time we spoke he showed me pictures of his arms covered in cuts. He never came online again. I hope he's safe. He's probably dead.
There were also people who just stopped talking to me because I am, well, extremely annoying at times. For some reason, people just refuse to be blunt about such things. They are so afraid to hurt you, I guess. As if being ignored hurt less than just being told "I don't want to talk to you anymore."
I make a point of telling everyone I befriend about a billion times that if they find me annoying they should tell me. Very few people have made me that gift of honesty. There is one of them who was so honest about it that we managed to rekindle a friendship and he is maybe one of the people I feel the most at ease with now. Maybe because I know precisely that, that if there is a problem, he will tell me, because he's proved that in the past, so I don't have to doubt him, or his friendship, ever again. It had taken him a while to be honest with me though, and those first weeks where I saw him never answer me, and delete me off Facebook, and block me off twitter, were excruciating, because I had no idea what I had done.
For the longest time, people disappearing meant to things, either they had begun to hate me or they were dead. When it was a friendship falling apart, it usually came on more slowly, so I began to also dread people talking to me less, or simply responding instead of initiating conversation.
I have bipolar disorder type 1. That is something I became aware of, officially, when I was 16 years old, though I had had doubts for a while. I could identify things that kickstarted depressive cycles rather easily; death of a loved one, broken heart, etc. For the manic phases it was harder. Phases last months, long months. My longest one lasted something around six months, which is horrendous. Six months of feeling restless is horrible.
Then when I was 17 I started getting anxiety attacks. It would take me years to identify them as such. At first for me it was just "that thing that happens while I'm in manic phase". I'd get really restless, and feel an urge to do something, anything, mostly talk to someone, and most often no one was around and it was night so I couldn't do anything noisy that would have been relaxing, like playing music or dancing (this is how I learned to play bass, in fact. Bass, played unplugged, makes almost no sound so playing that at night didn't weak my parents up if I did it in my basement. Cue me playing Muse songs constantly). The fact that I felt that urge to have a conversation with someone, and that most often, no one was there, I guess sort of created this link of "lack of answer" to "panic attack".
Many things happened. My attacks got worst around the time when my boyfriend came back from Europe. I went into my first panic attack related psychotic break. You know what's horrifying about that is not just .. the fact that you're sick, or that you could do something terrible (one of my friends went into a toxic psychosis once after working with chemicals for a day and bit a lady on the bus. that's scary.) It's that, for the rest of your life, you have to look at yourself as someone that is not normal, cannot ever be normal. You're broken. Disabled. You're inferior.
It's extremely hard to look at yourself in any sort of positive light, to have any sort of self confidence at all when you know you've spent time curled up in a corner, hands grasping your head murmuring "please, please make it stop, someone, anyone". That seems like it's out of a cheap, badly acted movie, doesn't it? It's so much like it, it's a bit weird. I didn't think humans acted like that in any real situations but apparently I do. I'm probably not alone. I've lied in bed hallucinating all the people who hate me the most around my bed, pointing out my every fault, blaming me for everything that was wrong in the world. But when you have people in your circle of so called "friends" who goes as far as saying that you are "the cancer that is eating away at his social circle", the illusion is very, very close to reality.
A long while ago, March 31st of 2006, after getting drinks with my best friend for his sixteenth birthday, I went out with Charles and my friend Tony. I had met Tony on the Megatokyo forum. He was a graffiti artist, a very talented one, well known in Montreal, and he had even done me the honor of painting a huge piece, one night, on my school, in my honor. Back when he had done that, we barely knew each other. He was a sweet guy. He was daring, artistic, generous. He hated cops about as much as I did, had a thing for goth girls and liked rabbits. He designed some cool stuff for me, with my name, and a nice tattoo design that I proceeded to lose (if I hadn't, it would be tattooed on me now.)
When I went out with him and Charles that night, he taught the basics of painting to us. He told me how lately he was into doing acid, because you couldn't overdose on it, just be high for a really long time. I have no idea if that is true. Then eventually we got caught by the police, and I knew fully well if he got arrested he would be in jail for two years because of repeated offences. I let myself be caught so he could get away. Little did I know his back climbing over that fence was the last I'd see of him.
We chat on the phone quite a bit, and on MSN even more, about that night, laughing at the cops. He showed me pictures of the blood in his bath one night after he hurt himself. I couldn't be worried. I hurt myself all the time too, and I was fine (mostly, in that one period of my life, I was definitely more fine than I had been before, or after, despite the heavy drug abuse). He went to jail for a bit. His roommates had used his bail money for drugs. I don't know who bailed him out. One day his sister was looking for him and called me. I told her I had no idea. Eventually I know he started selling drugs. I passed the contact info on to Princess and Hugo.
One night Princess called me. "Yo Pav, do you know what's up with Tony? We had a deal, but he was a no-show." I told him I had no idea. He wasn't answering his phone. He was offline. He had seemed normal when I had talked to him the day before. I didn't think much of it. I was busy with other stuff (Laztana). Later on, at that NYE party I talked to you about the other day, Hugo and Princess told me they had never had been able to contact Tony again. His cellphone was now out of service. I looked at my logs. "He hasn't been online since." I brushed it off with the aloofness of a pro-gangster, trust me: "He's probably just in jail. Whatevs."
I thought about him often, especially once the 2 year mark came to pass, because I knew if he went to jail, it was probably for two years. Then I thought maybe he just changed emails, wanted to get away from his old life. I didn't give it much thought: how much could I miss someone I had not talked to in two years?
Then, one spring day of 2010, a saturday as I recall, I looked through my MSN contacts, trying to clear up the list, to delete people that had not been online in years, and I came across his email address. "Man, I really wonder what happened to that guy. Maybe if I google his email address I can find some online profile of a place where he's still active, and contact him. Let's give that a try."
My third hit was his DeviantArt profile, where his mother had left an Eulogy.
Tony had hung himself December 18th, 2006.
Nowadays in Montreal, especially around that date, sometimes you can see "RIP WASTER" painted somewhere.
I wish I could have done something. He wasn't the first of my friends to go that way, but somehow it hurt more, just the fact it took me four goddamn years to find out.
Around that time my anxiety attacks became more frequent. It's not rational, not rational at all. My boyfriend was out at the bar with his friends, and I texted him something like "Should I wait for you to get back or just go to sleep." And if he did not answer, I'd get anxious. I'd text a few times more, and then call. If he didn't pick up, I always imagined the worst. Because it could be. Life had taught me these were things that happened, that happened more than once. I knew, I could rationalize that there were like 99.9% chances that he was just fine, but it didn't stop my body from doing the classic reaction: this happened before and led to something bad therefore danger therefore fight or flight reaction therefore adrenaline, launching my body in a terrible, terrible panic attack.
The longer the person doesn't answer, the worst it builds up, to a point, and then I guess, either I can't keep up a panic attack for more than 15 hours, or maybe I just give up on the person entirely. I don't know. It's worst when it's my boyfriend, or guys I'm seeing. But it does it for pretty much anyone.
My body/brain came to equate "no feedback" to "danger". And as much as I can rationalize it, it doesn't stop it from happening. If I get in a phase where this happens often, then in between attacks it never goes away. There is always this painful restlessness. I have often described it as "that moment in a roller coaster right, right before the drop, how you feel at that precise moment, but held out nonstop for hours, days at a time."
As I said earlier, it's very hard to respect yourself when you're this disabled by things that are completely normal. It's also expected that no one will ever respect you, or enjoy your company (how could they).
One day I talked to Laztana, back when we were still close friends, back before he decided to be the country hick he was and vote against the strike, like an idiot who thinks that if he can pay for his shit everybody should be able to, and that he just wanted to "be done with school" (sure that's why this is your third diploma, douchebag). I quoted him this from "Criminal Minds":
"I'll tell you what you are to me. You're my god-given solace. You promise me one thing; whatever happens...don't you ever stop talking to me"
It's what he, specifically, as well as a few more friends, were to me. People I could take refuge in. But in general I so wish people would just never stop talking to me. If people never stopped talking to me, when someone did not answer, I could just assume that truly they are busy. It's not rational, it's never rational. Maybe it wouldn't change anything. I don't know.
