Chapter Three
Quinn - Present Day
I am not ok – Jelly Roll
The first time my mum gave me antidepressants, I was seven. My dad was at work, and after a period of depression, it was safe to say she had had enough.
We’ve had enough of you, too. Die! Die! Die!
She thrived off of the attention from taking me to doctors.
Having a mentally unstable seven-year-old was like the icing on the cake for her.
The sympathy she received, the benefits from the government as my ‘carer’, and my dad was none the wiser.
Completely oblivious to the fact his child was basically medically sedated and unable to function.
The epitome of ‘ask no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies’.
He doesn’t love you, la, la, la, la, la, la!
At nine, she gave me my first diazepam, and the game changed. The moment the medication took hold and I felt like I was floating, I was hooked. My muscles relaxed, my brain felt sleepy, and for once, the racing thoughts and the constant inner monologue slowed down.
Illegal drugs have never appealed to me, but the high I get from convincing a doctor to prescribe me something new, I can imagine, is on par with the burst of adrenaline one gets when purchasing illegal drugs on a street corner.
You belong on a street corner, you fucking whore. No one wants you. Look at that face! It’s like a smashed brick!
At ten, I was immune to antibiotics. She had taken me to the doctors so many times for coughs and common colds that when I was struck down with a severe urine infection, none of the antibiotics worked, and I ended up in hospital with sepsis.
Despite this information, none of the doctors flagged it to social services or questioned the level of treatment I had received.
Many nurses chose to turn a blind eye. The whole ‘do no harm’ oath was an actual joke.
You’re an actual joke.
But there was one nurse, Agatha, who I’m sure knew what was going on.
She would ask questions that I shouldn’t have answered.
She gave me hugs when I was sad. I’d forgotten what human connection felt like at the grand old age of ten.
Let that sink in for a second. Agatha did her best for the week of that hospital stay to treat me like a ten-year-old and allow me to have some semblance of a childhood—however temporary.
The downfall of the free healthcare service in the UK is that many of us fall through the cracks, never to be heard of again.
We’d push you through the cracks, but you’re too fat to fit.
And then one day soon after, Social Services paid a visit, and everything got worse.
It got worse as my mum's health deteriorated.
For as long as I can remember, my mum's mental health episodes ran my life, and they tended to coincide with my trips to see specialists or get tests and scans that were always inconclusive—apparently—I’ve never been allowed access to my medical records.
Every appointment consisted of Mum and me, and I was only to speak if spoken to.
Dad was never there, because he had no knowledge of these appointments, or maybe he was just working; I have yet to discover.
He doesn’t give a shit about you!
Once her physical issues commenced and her pain got worse, they were what determined where I could go and what I could do. And the worse she got, the more attention was provided.
If I had to pinpoint when I started mirroring her behaviour, it was probably when I was twelve and started my periods.
I realised that the idea of his little girl growing up and me suffering the way I did with them caused my dad to have empathy.
To comfort me like I was his favourite girl and he bought me snacks and books to keep me occupied while I was decaying in bed from blood loss.
The emotions that fluttered through me once a month when Mother Nature hit were enough for me to understand why she had spent so many years thriving from the chaos she caused by making her kids appear sicker than they were.
When we were sick, she felt loved. When we were sick, people would visit; people would check in on her. When we were well, she was alone.
And the rest, as Natasha Bedingfield would say, was still unwritten, because she viewed me even more as competition as I grew into womanhood.
Come on, be for real, you’re too fat to be a woman.
Eventually, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder—which it turns out is hereditary—so along with every other diagnosis I would come to receive throughout my life, I also had her to thank for the state of the inside of my brain.
The voices decide to switch things up for a change and start serenading me.
Quinn is fucking crazy. Quinn is fucking crazy. La, la, la, la, la, la, Quinn is a fucking loon.
But where hers was acceptable, mine was not. Mine was me being dramatic or attention-seeking, not genuine cries for help.
Are you done crying yet?
Case in point: when one day, at the age of thirteen, she walked into the bathroom while I was playing dot-to-dot with a compass from my maths set.
The rage that graced her face as the realisation dawned on her was, quite honestly, hilarious.
But it soon became apparent that her rage wasn’t at my actions.
No. Her rage was at the fact that my blood had stained her bathmat, so she screamed at me to clean up my mess when I was finished and left the room.
You heard that correctly: she told me to finish, and then left. #mumgoals, am I right?
Her diagnosis came long before there were different types.
It was just a blanket diagnosis; chuck some medication at it, and leave the family to contend with her erratic behaviour.
No support whatsoever. Some may feel sorry for her or even have empathy.
I, however, do not. Your past trauma is not an excuse to abuse your children.
It’s a reason to be how you are, but it isn’t an excuse to be a terrible person, and if you’re dead set on not making your life better, then you shouldn’t be having kids.
At this point in my life, I’m not naive enough to even consider having kids.
Even if I do the work and get better, the fear of turning into my mother would always be prevalent. To be honest, it already is.
For some reason, I never quite believed what she told us after seeing the doctors.
At any age, I can give you a different diagnosis that my mother had.
I can give you the different medications, the time it lasted, and how many doctors she had to go to to get it recognised before something changed.
There was no consistency. As I have aged, I can see the similarities between us, and that makes me sick.
I’m realistic enough to acknowledge that any potential relationships I may enter, I will more than likely destroy because I am unable to be honest about my health.
At this point in my life, I don’t know which diagnoses are true and which ones are not, but the prospect of starting from scratch, the unknown, has me running for the hills.
QUINNY IS DELULU!
People are uneducated when it comes to mental illness.
They hear bipolar, or borderline personality disorder, or schizophrenia and run for the hills.
My only diagnosis as a child was depression.
As an adult, there has been no follow-up, no new assessments, no medication reviews; it still all goes through my mum, who claims herself as my carer and makes sure they know I’m a risk to myself, so I couldn’t even tell you the names of my own medications.
She tells me I have BPD and that’s why I’m so unstable.
But then in the next breath it’s all in my head, and I’m a faker. I can never keep up.
Every morning her alarms blare, and I’m given a pile of pills and watched until I’ve swallowed them all.
Even when I was married, it was the same.
She trained him impeccably to fulfil the task when she couldn’t.
But in a time when mental health is prevalent across the world, and genetics are getting weaker each generation, it seems like we, as the younger generation, are expected to pick up the pieces of the shit show the older one has left behind.
No apologies, no allowances, no understanding.
An alarm blares from my mother’s phone somewhere deep within the house.
“Quinn! Tablet time!”
This has been our routine for the last twenty-plus years.
I can’t tell you a time I didn’t have some kind of medication to take at some point throughout the day.
Yet, aside from relaxing me, they never seem to treat my symptoms. The voices are always there, as loud as ever.
The pain sears my body like nothing can numb it.
My nerves are on fire, constantly. Mum will tell me to work out more, go for a walk, stretch and lose some weight. I’ve tried it all; nothing helps.
“Coming!” I’ve tried on occasion to broach the subject of my medications, but she stops me every time. Maybe today is the day.
I walk into the kitchen, and she leans against the sink with the tablet box on the side and a glass of water next to it.
Her foot tapping out of sheer annoyance.
There are a total of nine tablets at this point.
Nine in the morning, ten in the evening, and depending on my outbursts, sometimes throughout the day, too.
“Here you go.” She slides the meds across the counter towards me.
“Do you think it could be time for us to get an assessment? I’ve been on these for so long, and I don’t feel any different.”
“No, Quinn. You only had one a few months ago, remember?
“I don’t remember that. What did they say?” The memory blanks are so frustrating. Important things I should remember just seem to disappear into the abyss.
“They said the meds were doing what they should and to carry on as normal.”
“Oh. So this is it, forever? I’ll never get better?”
“No. You’ll always have to take medication to be able to function and live your life.”
“Can you at least tell me what they are? Maybe I can research an alternative?”
“You don’t need to stress yourself over all of that, Quinn. I’m in charge of those because you can’t be trusted not to hurt yourself.”
“But—”
“No, Quinn. It’s not up for discussion. And don’t you dare involve your father. Now, take the tablets.”
I pick up the container full of meds. They’re a mixture of colours and shapes, and for a moment I wonder if I could figure it out from that.
But she always locks it away out of reach.
I suppose that’s my own fault. It’s not like I don’t have form, but how can I build trust without the opportunity to?
I slug the meds like they’re an alcoholic shot and gulp down the water.
“Show me.”
“Really?” I deadpan.
“Open your mouth, Quinn.” She rolls her eyes as if I’m being audacious.
I open my mouth, tongue out, waiting for permission to close it. I feel deflated. Every time I think she may listen to reason, she proves I should no longer hope.
She locks the cupboard that houses the pill bottles and leaves the room. I let myself fall against the kitchen side as quiet sobs overtake me. I just want to feel normal again. I put my hand on the side to steady myself, and the knife she used to cut the bread for lunch clatters to the floor.
There’s a knife. There’s a knife.
Pick it up. PICK IT UP!
Stab yourself!
Slit those wrists and do the world a favour!
It’s like a ghost haunts me over my shoulder every hour of the day. I bend down to pick up the knife, perusing the blade as it glistens from the sunlight pouring through the windows. I stroke it across my wrists.
Make sure you do it in the right direction, straight down, not across. Maybe for once in your life you could be a success at something.
I switch the direction of the blade and press down. A hiss escapes me. I move the blade, and a red indent greets me. I’m unsatisfied, so I press again, this time pulling the knife across the skin with just enough pressure to cause injury.
I know I’m falling into the trap of them saying I can’t be trusted. But I don’t know how much longer I can continue living like this.
Blood starts to ooze from the cut. The kitchen is silent, and I could swear I can hear the sounds of the drops pooling, seeping across my wrists, being pulled down to the floor by gravity.
It’s not fast enough, so I dig the knife deeper, the blood staining the handle.
The combustible pressure in my body eases, the liquid running thick and fast. I slide down the kitchen cupboards to the floor, the blood soaking my trousers, and breathe.
I breathe like I’ve never been able to breathe before.
Like all of the weight I’ve been carrying on my shoulders for the entirety of my life has just disappeared.
I have no idea how much time passes, just that the blood keeps coming, and black spots litter my view.
Before I know it, the darkness beckons me, and who am I to deprive it of what it so desperately wants?