Read Online Sliding Into Home by Kendra Wilkinson - Free Book Online

in and screamed at the top of her lungs. She grabbed the scissors out of my hand and, crying hysterically, wrapped her arms around me. She didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to say. I was out of answers and excuses, and she was too scared to continue taking care of me.
    It was time to go home.
    My mom took me back, of course. She didn’t really have a choice. I continued cutting, and she didn’t know what to do, either.
    I started becoming suicidal. One day I went through the medicine cabinet and took everything I could find. I put pill after pill inmy mouth, but it wasn’t enough. My mom and grandmother walked in on me as I was sitting on the bathroom floor surrounded by pill bottles and freaked out. They rushed me to the hospital, where the doctors said they were either going to pump my stomach or I could drink two cups of pure charcoal (I’m not really sure what that does, but I guess it works). I went with the charcoal, which was black and thick and tasted exactly how you would expect charcoal to taste. I gagged a bunch, but I kept it down.
    Before I could leave the hospital I had to write a letter promising that I would never attempt suicide again and that if I ever had a problem I would talk to my mom instead of taking a bunch of pills. As you can imagine, that didn’t work, so my mom forced me to go to counseling. I was open and told the counselor how I felt, but talking about my feelings didn’t help. Hiding it didn’t help, counseling didn’t help—I just felt so lost. There were no answers.
    I quickly went back to cutting whenever I was upset or high and crazy. It felt good. It was my way of dealing with all the teenage stress I had inside me. I always thought I was such an adult, but the truth was I couldn’t handle being fifteen. Everything made me depressed, which in turn drove me to cut myself.
    One day right after summer ended and I was back in school, I got called down to the nurse’s office. I was nervous. Being called to the nurse’s office was not common.
    “Let me see your arm,” she said when I walked in.
    “No,” I yelled, refusing to push up my long sleeves. Someone had clearly ratted me out, and I was mad.
    “I need to see your arm.”
    “No!” I shouted again.
    One of the counselors came in and held me down while the nurse lifted my sleeves. They saw the cut marks.
    I had promised my mom I would stop. I had promised her I would straighten out.
    I had lied.
    On the school’s recommendation, my mom picked me up and took me to Mesa Vista Hospital, a psychiatric ward in San Diego. For two weeks I stayed in the mental institution. I felt like a crazy person the entire time. While I was there I got into a fight and they put me in one of those white rooms with rubber walls. I was losing my mind. After that I was moved to another room, also with no windows. For two weeks I didn’t see sunlight.
    It’s all kind of a blur to me now, but I remember being in there and my mom, grandma, grandpa, and brother visiting every few days. I was sad and wanted to go home, but I knew I had to stay. I knew I was sick.
    I was still so depressed and cried a lot. Every night the nurses gave us antidepressant pills, and they would check our mouths to make sure we took them. The pills actually did more bad than good, I think. Considering I had a problem with pills to begin with, I thought I was better off without them. So I vowed that when I got out of there I would stop taking them on my own.
    Some nights the nurses took us to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. I was fifteen and I was sitting in a room full of adults in an AA meeting. I drank a lot back then, but that was the least of my problems. The counselors wanted us to see how we would end up if we continued using drugs, but for me the scare tactics didn’t work.
    I had two roommates at Mesa Vista. They didn’t really care about me, and I didn’t care about them. I was a lot more involved withdrugs than most of the people around me; they